Camera 305 doesn't clear. I've pulled it eleven times now going back to July, or ten, close enough, and every single pull comes back the same, haze sitting on the lane like somebody left a filter on the lens, and I want to say fog because fog is the boring word and boring words are what keep the man on the district line from hanging up on me faster, but its not fog, fog burns off by nine some mornings and this doesnt burn off at all, doesnt matter what time i pull it, doesnt matter the season. 305 sits south of Winchester Road on the 15 and its the only one on that whole stretch that looks like this. I checked 302 the same night, same five minutes, clean. 310 too. Headlights sharp on both, road surface you could read a plate off if a plate ever sat still that long, and 305 in between them smeared out like somebody breathed on the glass and never wiped it.

Postmile on this one is six point five zero three. I wrote it out longhand before i noticed anything, six five oh three, and then i turned it around, which is a thing i do with numbers now, same as when i measured the spacing to the inch on the 60 and it held up every time i went back, i turn the numbers around and see if they still mean something on the other side, and backwards its three oh five point six. The camera number with a decimal stuck on the end like an afterthought. I know how that sounds. I know a postmile is just a distance marker on a corridor and an ID is just an ID and there is a whole maintainance-schedule reason the district hands out numbers close together (i called, i got the reason, i always get the reason, i wrote it down anyway because i write down what they tell me even when i already know its nothing... my mother used to check the stove twice, off, off, even after the knob was already at zero, said by the third house it wasnt about the stove anymore, it was just the checking. anyway) but none of that explains why the marker and the ID match digit for digit on the one camera in the corridor thats permanently fogged and not on the two clean ones sitting right next to it.

Somebody is keeping that lens dirty on purpose or the fog is built into the feed before it ever leaves the box, and I dont know which one i want to be true, because one of those is a guy in a truck and the other is something further up the chain than a guy in a truck ever gets sent for. Coincidence? no. a camera does not pick its own postmile. the truck pages are still up if anyone wants to check whether the crew thats supposed to be cleaning district glass is the same one that keeps not fixing my pole, i havent lined the dates up against each other yet.

UPDATE 10/12:

Went back through the corridor the way I do now, two cameras at a time, because if somebody built the haze into 305 on purpose then the rest of the corridor has to be doing SOMETHING too, it doesnt have to be the same thing, it just has to be something, haze is just the one they let me find first. Pulled north instead of south this time, same as when I found the ringing one, and north of the Fourth Street exit theres a camera numbered 85, SBD 15 NB PM 3.412, and 85 is clean. no haze. clean glass, clean feed, you can read the exit sign off it fine. that is not the thing I want to tell you about.

What 85 showed me at eleven forty seven at night was every lane stopped. not slow. stopped, bumper into bumper into bumper, taillights the whole width of the frame and a box truck sitting dead center of it like it had been there a while, and I pulled the district incident log for that corridor same night same window. nothing. no collision, no closure, no CHP unit logged anywhere near postmile three for that hour. a freeway does not stop like that for no reason and then un-stop with no record of why it stopped, I checked the feed again twenty minutes later from my phone just to see, and it was moving again, same lanes, like none of it happened, except the ten forty seven pull is still sitting right there so I know it happened.

3.412 backwards is 2143 and that doesnt match 85, doesnt rhyme at all, same as when 139.237 didnt rhyme with 382 either, the ringing one is still up if anyone forgot, and I already know what my brother in law would say about that, that it proves theres nothing to the first one either, and I dont think that follows. I think it means not every camera on this corridor does the same trick. some fog. some ring. some just stop everything in frame at midnight and start it back up like nothing, box truck included, and I am not saying it is the same truck. I am saying it is a truck and it was there and then the whole road was moving again and it was gone. havent gone back to check what 310 does at that hour yet. not tonight.