My trip to the coast

So, I was out at the coast this weekend. I was sitting in the car in the motel parking lot for some reason and I heard a long, loud inhuman howl. It sounded like a hound, but toward the end it sounded like human crying.

After a moment a distressed-looking woman was walking along the sidewalk. I thought maybe I should go and talk to her, but I didn't know what I could do for her. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I didn't since I found out later she had assaulted a couple of people including her boyfriend.

I didn't know it but she had been at the motel screaming obscenities at her boyfriend. She wanted the car keys but he wouldn't give them to her because she was drunk. There was a children's party going on at the motel pool so they couldn't have that and she was ordered to leave. I'm not sure what the sequence of events was, but she went into a pub where she attacked her boyfriend and a woman. Someone from the fire department was there and made sure she didn't have the car keys, but she somehow got hold of them, jumped in the car and sped away. She narrowly missed running down a few pedestrians, nearly crashed into several cars and then jumped a curb, sped across a lawn and drove off a 150 foot cliff.

I didn't know about any of this either. I was sitting in a restaurant waiting for an order. There was a siren. A police car sped by. I thought, Oh, crap. I hoped it wasn't that woman I saw and didn't bother speaking to. A little later, a fire department SUV sped by followed a minute later by an ambulance.

She survived the crash. It was only a Chevy Cavalier, but it held up remarkably well considering it went off a cliff and crashed on the rocks. She wasn't wearing a seatbelt.

It turns out that she is a local actress and singer. She went to Julliard. That long strange howl was years of voice training.

Well, I don't think there's anything I could have done for her other than call 911, which wouldn't have been a bad idea but I'm one of the few people walking around without a cell phone so I couldn't even have done that. And if I had talked to her, she might have slugged me anyway. Other people tried to deal with her and she seemed more belligerent than anything else.

It was just by sheer chance that no one was killed.