Shopping Cart Tossing

Year: 1998
Place: Raymond, Alberta
My age: 20

Highway 4 south of Lethbridge was undergoing major construction at the time, and was therefore rarely used by the residents of Raymond, since it was easier to head west on highway 52 and then north on highway 5 to go to Lethbridge instead of going north on highway 845 and then northwest on the ripped-up highway 4. As a result, highway 845 was virtually deserted late at night.

I was actually living in St. Albert at the time getting ready to go on my mission, and I was in Raymond visiting my cousins who lived there. One night, Noah, Neil, and I went to Lethbridge, probably for a late night trip to Burger King. We saw a shopping cart abandoned in a ditch. It had been there for days, and Neil had earlier remarked that if it was still there the next time he drove by, he was going to steal it. Since it was still there, we decided it was time to steal it. We were, however, riding in a car at the time (probably Neil's Hornet, or maybe his Gremlin), and the shopping cart wouldn’t fit. Instead of doing the sensible thing and saying, “Shucks, I guess we won’t steal it” we drove back to Raymond, got the family truck, and drove back into Lethbridge to retrieve the lonely shopping cart. Great. Now what do we do with it? We weren’t homeless, so we didn’t need it to transport all of our earthly possessions. So we must have realized the futility of stealing a useless object and left it in the ditch, right? That would make this a pretty boring memory.

I don’t know which one of us thought this up (when the three of us got together, our collective IQ dropped, even though we never even drank), but we decided it would be cool to get the truck up to a speed of 120 km/h and throw the shopping cart out of the back. It was 2:00 am, and we figured the safest place to do this would be on the practically deserted highway 845. (A-ha! So there was a reason for that first paragraph about the state of southern Alberta highways in the late '90s!)

There must have been a new moon, or close to it, that night, because it was pitch dark in the country. We made sure we couldn’t see even the hint of headlights approaching from either direction, and then Noah and I got in the bed of the truck with our new toy. When Neil was going 120 km/h, he shouted at us that we were good to go. Noah and I pitched the cart out of the back of the truck. I was expecting some sort of lame result. A few small sparks if we were lucky. Instead, what we got was a spectacular fireworks-like display of sparks lighting up the highway as the cart struck asphalt and tumbled to an eventual halt. Noah and I laughed the uproarious laughs that only teenage boys (okay, and 20-year-old man-children) up to no good are capable of. We drove back to retrieve the cart and repeated the stunt at least two more times, each of us taking a turn driving so that we all could be filled with the Word of Wisdom-friendly intoxication of cool-looking, illegal destruction. Who knows how long we would have kept doing this if we hadn’t noticed headlights approaching in the distance, at which point we retrieved the battered and broken shopping cart and went home.

Neil put the cart in the neighbour’s garbage bin, and we saw the delighted neighbourhood children playing with it the next day, effectively making Neil some sort of bizarre, twisted Santa Claus.