I love these things! I’ve never bought another Mother’s day/Aniversary/Valentine’s day/Birthday present again! Always a teddy bear and some flowers, right there for the taking! I’m a little dissapointed in the trend of *leaving the fucking empty bottles of booze * for your buddy.
The wife thinks I’m pretty thoughtful, and the girlfreind thinks I’m rich! Bring her something new EVERY booty call!
Drive like shit, fuckers! I got a quota to keep up.
You, Sir, are a Gentleman and a Scholar. 
…who has to stay in school just a le-e-e-tle longer, until he masters the whole “i before e” thing…
As I was cycling the other day, I came across one of these shrines (at the corner of Chemin Senneville and Chemin de l’Anse-à-l’Orme at the far end of the Cap-St-Jacques nature park, if you care, way up in the back end of beyond, or as close as the Island of Montreal ever gets). Two teenage girls were attending to it – I didn’t see quite how – and their car was stopped there with its doors open, blaring some sort of Britney-esque pop.
It was somewhat incongruous, yes.
Hah. If you’d told me three years ago that I would finally cough up the $15 to join the SDMB just so I could post a defense of weird roadside shrines, I probably would have… well, I probably would have just shrugged. I’ve done way flakier stuff. But I digress.
In my late teens and early twenties, my best friend was a girl I’ll call Vita here. Vita’s older sister, let’s call her Carolyn, died about two years before I met Vita. Late one night Carolyn was driving home from her boyfriend’s house, where he lived with his parents. It was a dark and winding road, and it’s presumed that Carolyn was pretty distraught/emotional, as she’d just had a fight with her boyfriend. She lost control of the car on a curve and hit a telephone pole. From what I understand from what Vita told me about the accident, her sister died not so much because she was driving too fast, but because she was so short that she had to be right up on top of the steering wheel in order to reach the pedals, and the steering column hit her in the chest.
When I knew Vita, she was not capable of driving on this road alone. Passing the place where her older sister had died in a senseless, tragic accident reduced her to tears. I know this because whenever she had to drive on this road, she asked me to come along with her. I usually ended up driving the car after Vita’s inevitable breakdown occurred. Fortunately for Vita, the only time she ever had to drive down this road was when she went to visit Carolyn’s boyfriend & his family. They had been very close to Carolyn and Vita maintained the relationship after her sister’s death. Unfortunately, there wasn’t another way to reach their house except by passing the telephone pole that Carolyn had hit.
And yes, Carolyn’s boyfriend and family had set up a weird roadside shrine at the telephone pole.
Vita herself was of two minds about the whole thing. When I was friends with her, she never left anything at the shrine, but she did stop at it several times. Vita had appointed herself as a kind of caretaker, and removed anything that was too old and garbagey-looking, She also took away things that she thought were "disrespectful” (her usage, not mine - Vita claimed she’d never heard the word ‘tacky’ used in a conversation until she met me, and never quite grasped the concept. ‘Disrespectful’ was the word she used and it could mean anything from tacky to trashy to ill-mannered to inopportune to, well, just plain old disrespectful), like the long-deflated balloons that someone had tied to the pole. But she didn’t take away the flowers and letters, or ever try to stop people from leaving stuff there.
Carolyn had been cremated, so there wasn’t a grave that anyone could visit or leave flowers or letters at. And Carolyn’s boyfriend and his parents had to pass by that spot every time they left their house. As I see it, that roadside shrine had three functions:
As other Dopers have already pointed out, it served as a reminder for other drives to be extra careful at that curve in the road.
It served as a sort of public memorial space. Vita said that some of her cousins and Carolyn’s friends had also left things there. In absence of a grave, it seems that this might be the next best thing. Even in cases where the deceased does have a grave, a public area may be easier for some people to access. I’m thinking here of say, a deceased teenager’s friends from school, who may not feel comfortable contacting the deceased’s family to find out where the grave or marker is located.
It may have made it easier for some to drive on that road. I know how I grieve, and I know that for me, I would most likely do anything up to and possibly including changing jobs, changing apartments and maybe even moving to a different town to avoid daily driving past the place where a loved one died, at least for the first couple of years afterwards. But many people, maybe even most people, would not feel that it was appropriate or necessary to go to such lengths. If I were in a situation where I absolutely had to drive past that spot daily, well, I probably would plant a single, tasteful specimen of the deceased’s favorite flower. Just so that when I drove by, I didn’t have to just think, “Jesus, that’s the exact spot where she suffered a painful, violent death, a thousand people drive past here every day and none of them knew her or even care,” but can remember that I knew her, and I do care, and I’ll keep her memory alive.
I suspect that if I am ever in this circumstance, my single, tasteful specimen of the deceased’s favorite flower would quickly be buried under a deluge of plastic roses and cheap teddy bears left by those who share my sense of loss and grief but not my sense of taste and propriety. Oh well. One person’s tacky and undignified display of “power-grieving” and disgraceful public drunkenness is another person’s Irish wake. So yeah, I do think those roadside shrines are eyesores - but I think I understand why they exist. I just hope I get the Irish wake when I go instead.
Kalhoun? Intolerant to religious traditions? Inconceivable!
:deadpan:
This sort of thing started in NZ in the late 80’s. The Highways Agency started marking fatal accidents with a plain white wooden cross. After a few years, the crosses were getting decorated, and eventually these big roadside shrines were cropping up. It’s called escalation.
As part of the cycle, the Highways Agency decided to remove the crosses from some roads, and the families went nuts - legal challenges, the whole works. They did get removed in the end, but shrines do still crop up.
Si
Yes, i wonder about this symbolism: why leave empty bottles? In pagan times. tjhe Romans would leave a cup of wine for their departed friend-they knew that some beggar would drink it. It’s also weird, considering that alcohol is usually the CAUSE of these fatal crashes! What-you want to honor little Jimmy? (who got drubk and plowed his dad’s BMW into a tree?) Let’s leave a bottle of his favorite booze! :eek:
Roadside shrines make me drive a little more carefully in that area, but they don’t bother me at all. It’s not how I would choose to grieve, but, hey, whatever gets you through the night. I don’t see how it’s much different from the memorial notices people put in the newspaper on the anniversary of someone’s death: “In memory of Jane Smith, gone 5 years. We miss you and love you, Mama.”
When the cross mentioned above was erected, the kids had a memorial service at the accident site. The Chief of Police made an appearance and took the opportunity to tell the assembled kids that if the accident victims had been wearing seat belts, they most likely would have walked away from the accident. I hope some of those kids took that to heart.
There was a VT state trooper killed on the highway a few years ago, the only state trooper killed by another person in the line of duty. He was laying down a strip to stop a fugitive and the fugitive swerved around it into the median and hit the trooper. That spot gets new flowers and a flag every year. It seems appropriate because it was such a rare thing.
Tikki, I grew up in a very rural part of the southwest suburbs of Chicago - Palos Park (pop. 3,000!) and as early as the late 1970’s these were in place down there - especially along long, dark stretches of road through the forest preserves. They were always JUST crosses - that’s it - no balloons, no candles, no teddy bears - just a cross. I particularly remember one on I think it was Willow Springs Road - I’d be willing to bet it’s still there.
As far as it being a particular ethnic/religious tradition, in the cases where I was from, it had NOTHING to do with ethnicity/religion. Seriously - nothing whatsoever. (I say that because I sense that Kalhoun is being taken to task for something that isn’t necessarily the truth - and I’m trying to mitigate the trainwreck.)
I am morbidly curious; did he continue to flee?
It’s different in the same way that dumping an unwanted couch by the side of the road during the rainy season is different from placing an ad for it in the “Free Stuff” section of the classifieds.
Point well taken .
I’m an atheist, but I tend not to call other people’s grief into question, it being grief and whatnot. These people are suffering, and suffering usually requires some kind of externalization for it to be discharged. Let them be.
I saw those for the first time when I was a exchange student in Ecuador. I took a trip to Copper Canyon in Mexico a few years ago, we rented an truck and drove down a switchbacking unpaved road to a mining town at the bottom of the canyon. There was more than one white cross along the road, you can be damn sure I pointed every single one out to whoever was driving**. Cute clip from link:
I can understand the complaints about ratty toys and balloons, but I can’t understand why anyone would be bothered about a simple roadside cross at an accident site. Fine if its not your cup of tea but a bit much to criticize other families over it.
**Our group did all the driving. If we had a local driver I wouldn’t have worried, but with a gringo behind the wheel I was near tears.
I think the whole thing started decades ago when people would put up simple markers – usually a cross – as a sort of warning to other drivers that someone had been killed there – it was supposed to be a somewhat sober reminder that driving wasn’t always safe, a silent plea to slow down, drive safely.
I don’t remember when the first “tragedy” memorial started – runs in my mind sometime in the 1980s, maybe very early 80s, around the time John Lennon was killed. That was when I remember seeing flowers and stuff being deposited at the scenes of killings, horrible accidents and so on. There were some particularly heinous killings of children in the 1980s and people started putting teddy bears and personal effects at those sites. It really took off after the Oklahoma City bombing and went almost completely out of control with Princess Diana’s death. Over time the roadside markers and the tragedy shrines have merged.
I’ve never given it much though, except that I thought the public outpouring of grief was a little overdone – I think most people who participate just want to be part of something dramatic. It’s another symptom of the over-dramatization of American life, where we all think we’re the stars of our own TV shows.
Yep, he kept driving and ended up (on foot) on the Appalachian Trail in Penna.
It’s on page 46 of this PDF The VT articles appear to be not free.
Oh, and here. He was sentenced to 26 - 33 years.
There is one down the road from my current apartment. It’s a small white cross, neatly painted with the words WIFE and MOM on it. Usually a few flowers too. It makes me sad whenever I pass it.
I don’t see a problem with it. Most of the ones I see seem to be for younger people that died well before their time - it’s tragic, and I don’t blame their family and friends for putting up a little cross or something. I just see them as saying “Hey my kid died here…please be careful.”