Now I know why people don’t walk through Columbia Park after dark.

My friend Ingrid emailed me today to see if I wanted to get together to commiserate about being super pregnant. I told her tonight was my only available night this week and that I was dying to go for a walk. Forgetting that it gets dark a little earlier now that it’s late August, we agreed to meet at my house at 8 p.m. and to walk the loop around Columbia Park.

The park is awesome because it’s tree-filled, which means you are protected from the heat of the sun when it’s hot and from the rain when it’s stormy. Unfortunately, those trees also make it kinda creepy when it’s not light anymore. You can’t see more than about twenty yards into the park from the street after the sun goes down. GTB and I have long speculated that there must be all kinds of debauchery that takes place in there at night.

And now I have proof that we were right.

On our second loop around the park, it was not quite dark yet, but it was dusky. We approached a garbage can that had a pile of clothes next to it. As we got closer, we realized it wasn’t a pile of clothes, but a passed out man with a syringe lying right next to him. Ingrid, being much more Christian than I am, stopped to see if he was OK. I saw the syringe and thought the best thing to do was to get to a payphone and call 911. Once Ingrid saw that the guy couldn’t be roused, she ran looking for a payphone. We found one a few feet away and she dialed 911 as we heard sirens approaching. The 911 operator told Ingrid that help was on the way and to flag the paramedics down. So there we were, two hugely pregnant women, running toward the other end of the park trying to get the medics to hurry in our direction.

We stayed by the unconscious guy until they broke out the crash pack and throat tube thingy. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to handle watching them pump his stomach so I asked Ingrid if she wanted to stay. She said no so we moved on. Our previous conversation about the aches and pains of pregnancy suddenly seemed trite and we both felt pretty lucky that the worst going on with us was sore hips and frequent pee breaks.

I don’t know what happened to the guy and the syringe, but I do know that I won’t be taking any more non-daylight walks through Columbia Park.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.