Really the title of this post should have been Riding Fool Meets Zombie Apocalypse in Trumpie Yard, because technically I was on my bike and not wearing my hospice nurse badge when I encountered the zombie apocalypse. But somehow I feel so much more equipped for meeting the living dead as a hospice nurse than as a road biker. Maybe it’s the bandages and the scythes.
It was a Sunday afternoon, the first really chilly Fall day in upstate New York, and I was out for a bike ride. It had taken me all week to work up to it but I was finally clipped in and feeling pretty strong and intrepid. I took a road I knew in my new neighborhood and then I veered off onto a road I didn’t know and just kept going. Now I was feeling indestructible. The countryside was bucolic, like it tends to be around here on Sunday afternoons. The last golden leaves clung to some trees, there were stone walls and horses and ponds.
There were also tons of Trump/Pence signs, a lot more than Biden/Harris signs but I tried to sublimate my desire to set fire to them all, and comforted myself with the thought that those with the most fear tend to shout the loudest. All those houses with no signs? Probably Democrats. There was no way all those raucous election lawn signs were going to ruin my ride.
I passed a farm with miniature goats, and one with a courageous little fountain making a clear space in the algae of its pond. My chain came off halfway up a scary hill with no shoulder but I got it back on in record time, just before being creamed by an F150 roaring up the hill with no conception of what three foot clearance means.
So I was still feeling pretty good as I coasted down the hill after the chain event and turned a corner. Imagine my delight to spot what appeared to be a life-size re-enactment of the Thriller video on the lawn of a white clapboard house. I took it in briefly as I rode by but I was in such shock I was three hundred yards down the road before I realized I had to turn back and get a proper look.
I rode back. As I did, I noticed the Trump signs in the driveway. But the horror of those was pretty much eclipsed by the mannequins crowding the lawn. There must have been fifty of them. Mummies, zombies, grim reapers, and general living dead types with hollow eyes and horns and hoods and freaky nun headgear. There was a fenced in graveyard with two giant signed gateposts: Mortuary and Village Graveyard. There was a warning not to enter the graveyard or zombies would take their revenge. As I stood by my bike taking photos, some sound effects kicked in. I took a last shot and sped off.
My parting image was of the weird little family of brightly dressed clowns in back of the zombies. They had a little pink car and were somehow the creepiest of the lot.
Driving around Dutchess and Ulster Counties seeing patients, I have been continually bludgeoned by the extent of support for Trump in what I had blithely assumed was a majority liberal state. I mean, it’s New York, right? Wrong. It’s the rural Hudson Valley. Not only are there a frightening number of supporters of the man in the Oval Office but they seem to feel obliged to bullhorn their politics in a glaringly belligerent way. Just a couple of hours before that Sunday ride, our peaceful weekend was harshly interrupted by a Trump Train: a parade of 30 vehicles past our house. Giant flags. Tooting horns. Predominantly outsized trucks, military-style Jeeps, and lots of angry noise. Then there were the trucks in front yards with hydraulic arms mounted on them hanging outsize flags supporting the man who would make America great again.
None of this was funny. But the zombies on the lawn suddenly somehow were. I mean, who does that? Who spends thousands of dollars to put a bunch of plastic life-size undead in front of their house a month? And it’s not like they live on the Interstate. This was a sleepy backroad. Kind of like putting your Trump/Pence sign up in the basement when the one lightbulb there has burned out.
And now it is today, November 8th, and I don’t need to tell you about the great weight off the shoulders, the tension we didn’t even know we were carrying, and the massive relief that a babyman in metaphorical pullups no longer has the nuclear codes as of January 20th.
I took another bike ride today, my first since being traumatized by the Thriller ensemble. The temperature was a weird balmy 70 degrees, the last brave trees were holding on to their golden leaves, and people with Biden/Harris signs were sitting out on their porches taking in the gloriousness. They called out good morning to me as I rode by, and I waved back and sometimes I called out something spontaneous and probably a little overly enthusiastic like isn’t it a gorgeously wonderful new day and I love you, I’ve never met you before but I love you anyway, oh my god I love you so much have an AMAZING life!
And the Trump/Pence signs? Taken down. And the hydraulic arms? Retracted. And the zombie apocalypse in the clapboard farmhouse yard? Gone from my sight. I wish that those lifesize undead creatures of horror were all behind bars in the state penitentiary for massive tax fraud and other zombie crimes, but for now, it’s enough for me that the lawn they inhabited is empty again and golden with fallen leaves.
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