Alex Got Lost: Construction in the Summer
Construction always has to happen in the summer.
It’s a pain to have to deal with the torn-up roads, all gravel and bumpy, with an obstacle course of vehicles filling holes and smoothing DST. Often times, you have to take detours through backroads that need repairs more than the ones they’re working on, making everything take longer.
The last few weeks, I’ve came to Grant Settlement Road to find an enormous behemoth of a machine extending its arm out to shave back the treeline from the road, leaving shredded wood scattering the narrow and winding road to pick up the Whitewater news. Often, it’s an anxiety trip to wait for the arm to dip back to drive past, as to not put the driver in peril, while still watching to see that a local farmer doesn’t turn the corner and meet my Jeep Patriot head on.
I know, of course, that we can’t really do any of this any other time. Spring is a flooding mess of melted slow, Fall is littered with leaves and debris, and Winter turns the entire ground into a block of dirt-filled ice that probably needs dynamite to dig up. Summer, despite its optimal weather to travel, is the only time construction can happen.
What’s worse is that, with the recent heat warning, I worry that working with hot, melting stone for hours on end is going to lead to a lot of sign-carrying, hard-hat topped workers suffering heatstroke and other ailments. Our climate apocalypse has little love of municipal planning.
I have no ill will to people who stand outside with signs, waiting to hear the word to flip it and watch the progression of impatient vehicles saunter past. Having to watch several certification videos watching road workers being chased down by street racers in dramatizations, I’m not exactly eager to make those worst-case scenarios real myself, and am extremely careful around such sites.
Still, summer is the time I realize how little I know about the back roads, when I try to be clever and sneak around road work, only to find myself in a swamp on a dirt road that looks like the beginning of a bad slasher film.
Given how terrible some of these roads are, it’s little wonder projects like Jeffrey Lake Road are such a focus, and why so many major roads are featuring construction.
