Never Buy a House on a Highway Curve

Our neighbor has a house on a sharp highway curve. The speed limit is only 45, but that does not seem to slow anyone down. They race up to and then try to slow down enough to make the turn on a regular basis. The neighbor is lucky enough to have the house on the inside of the curve, but his pasture is on the outside of the curve. People miss the curve so often the neighbor has to keep an extra gate on hand at all times to replace it when people ram his pasture gate and end up out in the field. He has tried to keep one of those triangular slow down signs there on the gate, but that does not always work.

The other night at 2200 hours (10 o’clock) the power went out suddenly. There was no storm, no rain, no wind, but his power, our power and that of neighbor’s up the road all went out at once. The neighbors were in bed watching the late news at the time. They crawled out of bed to see what was going on outside. They saw headlights in their pasture. He grabbed his rifle, she picked up a flashlight. (We have problems with cattle rustlers these days.) It turned out two young girls had been visiting up the road and were hurrying to get home and driving too fast to make the curve. They went through the neighbor’s fence and hit and snapped off a light pole.

I walked out to see if it was just my power or if it was a general blackout. I saw lights up on the main highway, but none on our section of the road. It was so quiet out without power I could hear voices down the road an eighth mile away at the curve. It was the neighbor’s wife with her flashlight speaking to the driver of the car which hit the light pole. I thought it was just a situation where another neighbor had stopped to talk about the power outage until I heard sirens from the local first responders roll up. By then the highway patrol had arrived and there was an ambulance on the way.

My wife and I had just given up on having our power restored and were going to bed when another set of headlights lit up the night and everything in the house. I grabbed my pistol, not knowing what was going on and thinking it might be a burglar or home invader taking advantage of the then current situation. It turned out the lights were from the power company’s truck, they were checking the lines before replacing the power pole and turning the power back on for the night.

Again, if you must buy a home on a sharp highway curve, get the one on the inside of the curve. If you get the one on the outside, you will be plagued with headlights shining in the house and the more than occasional car or truck skidding into your yard or the house itself.

This information is brought to you as a public service by the Sentinel News headquartered near Ash Grove Missouri.