Long Road Home

I want to talk about roads today.  We don’t really spend very much time thinking about them, do we?  But they’re everywhere.  Anywhere you need to go, there will be a road to get you there, whether it’s a ten-lane interstate, or a gravel road that may or may not drive through a creek.

The business of roads has to be enormous.  First there’s building them, which can take years of literally blasting the way through the land.  Then there’s maintenance, including cleaning up roadkill, removing trees, fallen power lines, and gas and oil spills, salting in the winter, and making repairs.  Periodically roads have to be torn up and repaved.  Toll booths have to be manned, police have to patrol, signs have to be manufactured and put up—the point is, thousands of people go to work every day to make sure that the rest of us can get where we’re going with a minimum of inconvenience.

I’ve been thinking about this because for the past few days, my road has been under construction.  Now often this is a source of annoyance, especially when the workers take months to do what should take weeks.  But I’ve been paying attention, and I’ve noticed that every day there’s progress.  The road is being repaved (which is kind of cool to watch, honestly) and so it requires the road to go to one-lane for a while.  When I drove out, I noted where they were; on the way back an hour later, I noticed that people were driving on the section which had just been laid down, and the workers had moved on.  I’m impressed, aren’t you?  It was forty-seven degrees today, as cold as it’s been so far this year.  It may not sound terribly cold, but when you have to stand out in it all day, it’s pretty chilly.  And yet things were getting done. 

So here’s a little shout-out to everyone who helps lay down the path for us.  To those who lay down the path, who connect A and B and perform the work that isn’t noticed unless it’s done poorly…thanks.