Hole in the road

Why did the chicken cross the road? Well, it left this side of the road, but I didn’t see it surface on the other side.

You know the inevitables—death and taxes. Bertha is adding one to the list. If you talk to anyone who owns a car, you will soon hear a complaint about the condition of the roads.

In the old days, the roads were unpaved, sometimes muddy or sandy and vehicles got stuck. Someone might not come along for hours. But after they paved the roads it was potholes. And don’t worry, someone is right behind you. You just have to keep right on going over, around or through the potholes or get run over.

Out in the county where I live, there are some shining examples. I am pretty good at missing them because most of them have won tenure. But my car still appears on the upper reaches of the front-end alignment frequency chart.

I guess the harsh weather is to blame for most of our potholes, and our weather is in the same place on the weather charts. What can I say?

Just so you know, it is not only a local problem. When we lived on the other side of the state, things were worse. One spring, I’m not kidding, this notice appeared in the Classified Ads of the local paper:

“WANTED. One dead horse to fill the hole on Utah Avenue.” Utah Avenue is a main cross-town artery.

Not all of the holes in the roads are the fault of Mother Nature. A friend of mine was complaining about the manhole covers. Some of them have sunk a little too far to be called covers. Maybe liners. He said, “You know they make rings that they can put on the edges of the casings to raise up the covers. How hard could it be to get some of those?”

So I was reading in another paper about manhole covers. I don’t want to make any suggestions, but apparently in other parts of the country thieves steal the covers and sell them for scrap metal. How do you think it feels to hit an open manhole with your passenger side front wheel? We should be happy.

I have to quote the story though. “According to a report in USA Today, hundreds of covers have been ripped off in several states the last three months—another sign of the sluggish economy.” Is that a pun?

Pun or not, it is a stretch to get my mind around the sluggish part since I thought the manhole covers had disappeared because the price of steel has soared.

My brother, who lives in New Jersey, blamed the weather for his manhole-cover anecdote. You may think it only happens in the movies, but one day it was raining so hard in Hoboken that the manhole covers began to pop. I think those things weigh more than I do. He just tried not to be on top of one when it blew. For your information, black, sticky, gooey material describes the stuff they put in potholes, as well as what comes out of manholes. His advice: When it rains, don’t ever run out of gas on top of a manhole.

Speaking of running out of gas, I told him that I hadn’t ever run out of gas since I got the kind of car that displays the number of miles you have left on your tank. Well, my brother the scientist says, “I don’t know how accurate those devices are though.”

I replied, “What? You’re in research. Do you need me to tell you how to test that? I know how to figure that out. I have let the little gauge get down to ‘0 miles left’ at least three times, and I haven’t run out of gas yet. So I know mine works.”

He said, “Great, but I can’t be conducting those kinds of experiments. I wouldn’t want to run out of gas on the New Jersey Turnpike or anywhere near it.”

We could all use a little device that says “pothole dead ahead,” though, providing it was accurate. Some of those holes are surely big enough to show up on satellite views and be entered into a GPS system.