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.
