The Road We Live On

            For where we live, in northern Vermont, our road is a busy street.  It is straight and it is paved - two rare features for our neck of the woods - and therefore it is subject to being treated not as a quiet country byway but as a good old American highway.  This road, Stagecoach Road, was recently closed for two weeks.  This all stems from Irene.  As hurricanes go Irene was not too windy or too violent.  Irene though carried massive amounts of rain. I could stand outside in the downpour and smell the sea air, which is notable only because we live hundreds of miles from the sea.  Irene was a beautiful storm but a dangerous one. No one was hurt, and we escaped with no damage, but the tail end of our road took the brunt of the storm. A neighbor's basement collapsed. The edge of the street near where it meets the main road to town eroded away. 

            For a month or more after the storm the town end of Stagecoach was cut to one lane of traffic.  This change was welcome to anyone living on the road because it slowed traffic for a short stretch.  This slowed the racers.

            We didn’t hear of the plan to close the road.  This doesn’t mean the plan wasn’t discussed publicly; it just means the bad shape of the road simply didn’t register on the scale of things to worry about.  My son did ask one day whether when they fixed the road it would be blocked off; we talked about it on a drive to school one morning.  We concluded, ‘no, the road would be left open.’  We didn’t talk about it again.  And we were wrong.

In fact we only heard the road was going to be cut from the rest of town when we ran into the kids’ school bus driver at the Thai Restaurant in Waterbury, a town near the interstate.  Yikes.  No school bus.  Need to drive north, to the neighboring town in the other direction, Morristown, and then reverse direction, adding time to the day.  Adjustments were called for. We put the planning gears in motion, set the alarm a bit earlier and prepared to learn a new commute to the school, a new plan to get the shopping done, a new pattern to coming home for lunch.

In fact though getting to town was not the big news of the detour.  The big news was the quiet.  Our little straightaway of road is typically not treated like the settled country lane it is.  Our country road is treated like a speedway.  Somehow saving up to one and one half minutes on a drive to Mo’ville justifies pushing the old Buick up to eighty while flying by the old Misty Meadow Herb Farm.  And it is to some even worth passing at breakneck speed, not for a second thinking a family might be pulling out of a driveway on this narrow road.

It's not like we rail against the road.  We are adjusted to it.  We sit on the porch in the summer, drinking our morning coffee, watching the pick up trucks drive by.  Occasionally we swear at a crazy driver thinking this is a Batman Movie but mostly we take it in stride.  But then they blocked the road and everything became quiet.

And the quiet was welcome. Yes, we had peace for two terrific weeks.  We could hear the breeze.  No car noises marred the kids’ band practice.  The hens could graze along the edge of the road.  We could collect the mail without safety goggles, helmet and yellow vests.

The peace wasn’t perfect.  Despite three signs saying, I’d say pretty clearly, “Road Closed,” there were some who drove past the signs, past the barriers and up to the construction site thinking the signs meant road closed “but not for me.”  Picture it: car drives by confidently toward the end of the road, pauses, looking for a cut in the work to sneak through, realizes there is no cut through and then skulks back north with tailpipe between legs.

Road closed. Cut off.  No one calling by.  Deeply quiet.  Forced to change long-settled patterns of behavior.  One big rainstorm and we’re all in turmoil.

Okay, it was little things like we shopped at the big grocery store in Morrisville rather than our own little one in town. It wasn’t big things, like Berlin, August 1961; waking up one morning faced with the Berlin Wall.  But it was a window into how things can change. 

Geography and the vagaries of civil engineers have as much to do with community as what we want to define ourselves. One minute we are a short, straight mile from the edge of town and the next minute we are a looping ride in the wrong direction, by a small golf course and then back into town with the traffic.  Inconvenience, change, busting up of routine; it is always difficult.

            Just before the roadwork was done I drove my little girl down to see the construction site.  The steamrollers were blocking the road so I parked and we walked onto the shiny black macadam, looking down to the new retaining walls and massive piles of moved earth and the huge machines parked, waiting for the new day.  Just across the barriers was the road to town, so close we could taste it.  In a day we’d have our road back, new and improved.  How exciting! 

            My little girl didn’t care.  When I turned to get her reaction she was well into her walk home; already past the vet’s house; not at all interested in the newness and the construction site and the reopening of our artery.  She was striding down the deserted asphalt strip in the gloam of a late fall dusk.  There was no traffic.  It was quiet.  She had adjusted to Stagecoach as cul-de-sac and all was well with her world.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio