Trolls Live Under the Bridges

This is our bridge, the Richland Ave bridge over San Jose Ave (which becomes Guerrero St a few hundred yards up). It is a nice bridge and I think it looks cool. However, there is more here than the eye can see. Notice the area between the hillside and the bridge abutment? Trolls live there. I'm serious. Real-life honest-to-goodness, trolls.

Here is a slightly better shot of the space to which I am referring. They don't exactly extract a toll from crossers, but there is an unusually high rate of car vandalisation and break-ins on the bridge. I had both of my locks messed with, the driver's side no longer works ($200 to fix), you often see broken windows and glass in the parking areas, and even Liz's old school 1984 Accord was broken into (they didn't get anything but left the door open and the battery went dead).

One hole in the fence means a troll infestation on the order of dozens. Liz has counted between 10 and 20 people going in and out of this space under the bridge during a typical day. During the nights you can hear them yell and shout and scream, sometimes they will throw glass bottles down into the abutment for 5 or 10 minutes creating quite a racket. The sounds that echo up from these spaces makes me think of how it will sound when civilization comes apart at the seams. But who knows...

What do they do under here? Drugs? Sex? A little of both? You can see in this picture that they have made a bit of a nest under there for themselves. The other day we saw a perfectly normal looking red head skulking around our Troll hole. What did she need? She kept darting up and down from below. Was she waiting for her dealer, her hookup, a hookup, to hookup, or what?

Are they just poor sad homeless people who need some shelter from the wind and fog? I have spoken to a couple of them, typical immigrants from Mexico or Central America, down on their luck. I truly feel for these poor folks, but that doesn't change the facts, they are our very own, modern day- Trolls.