Dim Blue Lines on the MapFor a very long time, the weather has been chill, and a series of snow and ice and sleet and what all else had fallen upon us all, a layer cake of winter on every surface.
In more ways then ever in my memory, this has done a terrible toll on our roads. Where cars would park and plows could not go, the slush turned black, froze, and tamped down leaving an undulating surface that was often higher than the sidewalk. There were berms a good eight inches high, again of that black compaction. In places where the sidewalks had not been cleared quickly enough, there was now no point. Water mains popped like corks under the salt-stained asphalts, bubbling up from beneath in a churn of cracks and new gravel to send fast streams down the gutters that would freeze to solid blocks in the overnight, embedding the tires of cars in two inches of hard murk.
Would that I were telling the story, I would claim that the city buses have absentmindedly buried some totem of great importance down there someplace, and are peppering the city infrastructure with a maniac archeologic survey, using very bad technique (although, to be fair, their only digging tools are large rubber balloons). In one section, Public Works has used sealant-coated concrete slab instead of asphalt for the bus lane, and it is mostly fairing better, but the busses have found a way: I watched one afternoon as a steady trickle of oily melt water ran down the gutter and then turned a corner and dribbled away beneath the edge of one of those concrete slabs which had been crushed into large gravel by the fist of traffic, the stream disappearing into the earth to fuel the next frost heave. Equally odd are the splashes of tarred gravel strewn across the sidewalk next to some recently patched hole, some large vehicle having driven the patch right out again.
In places, the skin of the streets has been peeled back by the violence, exposing the muscles below of streets past. It is something to look down into a pothole and see old cobble, seemingly indestructible and bleached white as bone. We still have some streets that sport brick and cobble on their surface, and it is interesting to see what other courses ran with whole stone, long ago.
Very near to us we have a street surface made up entirely of old railway ties, compressed and upended, grain toward the sky. The wood is very dark with age. The street is never plowed. it seems to have held up just fine.
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