I've had the supreme pleasure this summer of witnessing a great deal of road construction. Summer seems to be the time when our various departments of transportation decide that the dirt under the nation's highways has been getting far too much shade and decide to excavate every public thoroughfare larger than the drive through at Taco Bell.
When you first spot those big orange diamond-shaped signs you exclaim something on the theme of "oh crap" and begin scanning for further signs of orange. Maybe, you think to yourself, they're all done and just forgot that last sign, perhaps leaving it there in the hope that it'll take root, flourish, and shade future passing motorists with little diamond-shaped orange leaves. Then you top the next hill and expound with even greater passion on the "oh crap" theme as you gaze upon a snaking procession of winking taillights stretching off to the heat- shimmering horizon.
Now it's time to play Guess the Open Lane. This, of course, is the one clogged with barge-sized recreational vehicles large enough to have their own zip codes were they not semi-ambulatory. The other lane is invariably occupied by jackasses whizzing past to cut in at the last minute and create the backup you've dutifully elected to remain in. They usually seem to be 18 year old males with backwards baseball caps in Trans Ams or teeny little girls who must need a stack of phonebooks to see over the dash of their bubble-shaped sports car, the sort of vehicle that has a name like Mitsusushi Egress and a rear end bedecked with a big enough swath of gratuitous taillights that it could probably communicate with the musical aliens in Close Encounters if the stereo were hooked to the brake pedal.
You then pass the big blinking yellow arrow, which is usually powered by a sputtering generator that looks like it accompanied Admiral Byrd to the pole. Sometimes instead of just the blinking arrow, though, they'll have a portable sign board out that can actually display helpful text such as "EXPECT DELAYS". Of course, you're usually afforded the opportunity to spend about half an hour reading this insightful phrase, making the message a tad redundant. On my last trip, one such sign informed me of its apparent wish that I "HAVE A NICE DAY". The only way I could have pasted a thin veneer of "nice" on my day at that moment would have been to dismember the sign with a blunt object while shrieking with uncontrolled glee, but instead I merely offered my own sentiments regarding the type of day I sincerely wished it could experience. As it was just a sign, however, rather than a mid-level bureaucrat in the Department of Transportation and thus slightly less sentient, it appeared to take little notice of my invective, leading me to wonder just how sincerely it could formulate a sentiment such as "HAVE A NICE DAY".
By this point the speedy types previously described are weaving back and forth as quickly as one can at two miles per hour, craning their necks to see down the road and spot What's Causing the Delay. The cause, of course, is the fact that several thousand vehicles are all trying to fit through the same twenty- foot-wide piece of decaying roadway. But you can't get mad at an abstraction like queueing theory, and the speedy people want to catch a glimpse of some tangible, concrete object to beam hate rays at, a single precipitating cause for the backup, such as some poor old duffer going 15 mph in his '39 Nash with the blinker winking pointlessly. All they see, though, is dozens of other testosterone-crazed weenies down the road also squeezing out for a look.
I, however, generally get to spend the duration staring at the butt end of a semi with WASH ME written in the dirt on its doors by an anonymous finger. When you're a few feet behind it, the rear of a semi pretty much blocks the horizon and then some, and after a few minutes of reading and re-reading the "THIS VEHICLE MAKES WIDE RIGHT TURNS" label and admiring the truck's Yosemite Sam mudflaps, I start to get nearly as antsy as the speedy people.
Time spent in a construction backup isn't exactly quality time, it's simply lost time, and you begin making mental revisions of your estimated time of arrival and how concerned anyone waiting for you might become. The radio is generally a lost cause. You tend to wind up in these situations right in the geographic mean between population centers large enough to support radio broadcasts, and what comes in is usually a scratchy AM station with an announcer named Earl reciting the price of hog livers with a depth of emotion usually reserved for reading aloud pages of the phone book, or a fuzzy FM station at the far top of the dial running a show with a name like "Afternoon Warm Milk and Chat" with a Garrison Keilor sound-alike relating at tremendous length and geologic pace his fond memories of his grandfather's shoelaces over the course of several soporific hours. I tend to arrive at adrenaline-charged diversions such as inspecting the mileage charts in the corner of an available road map. By the time I'm getting into it and becoming genuinely interested in determining the distance between Peoria and Springfield, someone behind me is laying on his horn, desperate for me to tear into the broad expanse of ten new feet of roadway that's suddenly opened up ahead.
Eventually you actually witness real, live construction, such as it generally is. You would normally assume that any human endeavor that would require carefully arranging thousands of reflective orange barrels and detaining thousands of travelers over the course of several months would be a titanic struggle indeed, and by the time you finally reach the fabled Men at Work, you expect to see a crew as large as the cast of Spartacus struggling to build a twice-scale model of the Pyramids of Egypt. What generally greets your eager eyes, however, are three vertically prone individuals engaged in some distant cousin of work, with one of them operating a bulky orange vehicle that appears more suited to road destruction than construction, another watching the first guy operate the smoke-belching mechanism, and a third guy scratching his ample belly and providing the valuable service of watching the second guy watch the first guy.
This was the case in my recent journey, with the population density of the nearby construction site barely exceeding that of the Greenland ice shelf, despite a recent vicious heat wave having broken for a respite of cool weather and it being mid- afternoon on what was presumably a work day. I briefly considered urging Mr. Belly-scratcher on to greater heights of achievement with a helpful admonition, but realized that if traffic were to actually grind to a complete indefinite standstill rather than continue at its heady 2 mph blue streak, there was a finite possibility that he might waddle off in pursuit and, just as a glacier eventually reaches the sea, catch up with my fragile vehicle and possibly return my sentiments in physical form.
After what seemed like eternity's big ugly uncle, a final slalom through orange barrels released the sorry procession back onto a two lane stretch of unscathed road. It was snowing by that point, and judging by the news on the radio someone new had been elected president, but I was just relieved to be on my way. And as it turned out, I did, as a matter of fact, have a "NICE DAY".