Welcome to the em space, a staff writer's commentary page with reflections on life experiences in Logan County and beyond. Thank you for reading.

- Mary Krallmann


Under construction

For several summers there have been construction projects along my everyday routes. In most cases, the work hasn't affected me personally. It hasn’t disrupted my routines, and I haven't directly benefited from the completed projects either. The construction does give me something different to look for as I go by. It’s something extra going on in a season when there’s a lull in school-related activities. There are noticeable changes from morning to evening and from day to day.

This year, the changes have been more major than usual. One morning I heard a boom at breakfast time and saw the remains of a building being cleared away in the afternoon.

As in other summers, crews are often on the job already when I go to work. I might see people walking on a roof or I'll walk past large trucks lined up to do whatever goes on while I'm working elsewhere. At times I wonder what I'm missing. Some days a few workers are still around several hours after I've come home from my job.

I see scaffolding, stacks of bricks and lumber, black pipes, white pipes, green pipes, coils of orange tubing, rolls of black fabric, metal grating, and stray buckets. A sidewalk is interrupted for weeks with dirt piles and crushed rock. There are construction signs, barricades, blinking orange lights, orange netting, metal and wooden stakes with ribbons. I find brightly colored markings with cryptic messages on the ground.

If I come past during the day, there may be clouds of dust, vehicles parked at miscellaneous angles, workers standing partly below the surface in holes and trenches, men with hats, men without shirts, small machines and big machines – many of them yellow or reddish-yellow, with cabs and attachments and various purposes not necessarily known to me.

Also, there are touches of humor, such as the orange cone I saw perched like a jaunty hat on the corner of a sign.

The scenery includes heaps of clay, piles of crushed rock and odd chunks of leftover concrete, like an earthly version of a moonscape.

While lunar explorers went where no one had gone before, some of the surface features in construction areas weren't even there before the project started. Better yet, they're only temporary – until the next stage of the work – so the sights are definitely unique.

Just consider how rare it is to look right through a building (before the walls are complete) or how seldom a person has a chance to see what's under a building or under a street.

With all the yellow dirt piled around some of this summer's construction sites, I wondered if there was any black soil left. I went to check at a place where the previous road surface had been removed. It was unexpectedly interesting. With the work halted for the weekend, various sections were in different stages of the construction process. I don't know if I'd ever before had such a close look at how a road is put together.

In fact, for a limited time only, a person could walk on the ground itself in an area that's normally beneath the road surface. I did see black dirt there, as well as reddish areas with remnants of bricks.

I've traversed that particular stretch of road thousands of times, but never before with my shoes touching the soil and probably never again.

With projects under construction, sometimes the most interesting part is under the construction.

 

[Mary Krallmann]     

 

Postscript:

In the midst of the construction season, something else has been going up – smaller, more fragile, and without machines or human hands at work. First there were stems; then petals curled open. Surprise! The lilies are up. Maybe a sign would have been appropriate: Flower construction ahead.