They're Everywhere

If you wanna do something right use your own cone-

                               A Cone Head on Saturday Night Live

The other day I visited the smallish upstate town of a leafy suburb, hoping for a quick and bucolic respite from the unending repair of failing infrastructure. The city streets now often are shrouded with soil, dirt and rocks under the shadow of intimidating diggers and other humongous trucks with scoopers and dinosaur teeth that gleefully rip up every inch of asphalt. Toddlers love this, are completely mesmerized, could watch for hours. See Cooper, that’s a big, big digger!  Look what it's doing! The clanging and grinding for everyone else is pretty much unbearable and traffic basically nightmarish. Sink holes spring up in unexpected spots at an alarming rate, no doubt from the continual pounding. I figured a day away would be nice.

Lately my own neighborhood’s turn came and we were besieged by torn streets, dazed workers, unsuccessful attempts to direct foot and car traffic, and giant sections of ominous, round, black water pipe lying around; imposing tubes with a formidable presence stacked here and there at the curb, patiently waiting their own turn to be placed inside the long caverns that the large trucks and deafening drills created exactly in the spots where you normally plant your tootsies. Finally, the ubiquitous orange cones appeared, dropped almost randomly from the heavens to warn and direct you, though that also made no sense as there still seemed no clear pedestrian path.

In such cases of course you wind up zigzagging across lanes, weaving in and out of slow moving traffic manned by cursing drivers so that you can keep changing sides of the street just to keep moving. Eventually you do find a sidewalk, or at least a sizable section of one that is almost walk-able, as they always leave at least one, no matter how skimpy or narrow, to ferry you (and double strollers and people on walkers and dogs and runners) the hell out of there.  Eventually you find that lone little line of poured concrete creating a path to an intersection where finally you can cross and head back to the chimera of unperturbed civilization- always tantalizingly visible in the near distance- providing an illusion of maintained stability, a kind of  yellow brick, undisturbed paved road to the  un-wrecked familiar.

I see the cones everywhere. When they are not guiding you along a stretch of untrammeled sidewalk beneath you they're usually alerting you to treacherous roof work up above. They appear on highways and parkways to make lanes suddenly disappear. Sometimes the cones are simply plunked solo to steal a coveted parking spot. Really, they're everywhere. But back to that small, upstate town in the quiet, upscale, leafy suburb. . . .

So after lunch I decided to take a walk- a simple pleasure, yes? As I reached the center of the main street however with its little roundabout, I noticed something amiss: it was the cones, as far as the eye could see. They were placed in all four directions on all the streets leading out from the center.  So omnipresent were they in fact that they began to suggest something akin to the alien Cone Heads from Saturday Night Live, those pointy headed, ineffable beings who emanated from a far off galaxy and hilariously tried to blend in. Honestly though, these cones were not like those other, funny cones from SNL, but more like a silent invasion. We're worried about immigrants???  How about the damned orange cones?? And to make matters worse, unlike their cone headed cousins in the city, these cones were lined up fascistically straight, exactly parallel to the closed sidewalks they so meticulously straddled, not scattered randomly about like city cones; all routes were cut off  to everywhere and it remained eerily still. The four little streets that streamed out from the center were completely empty and devoid of human life, though I can't speak for the squirrels. As you can guess, these cones did not blend in but rather loomed.

As I searched for a way to proceed on foot, it became apparent that each street had been dug up and the sidewalks temporarily(?) obliterated, albeit in an oddly neat and orderly fashion- this offering a glint of solace, even though you were sort of trapped in the roundabout. The suburbs after all are not like the city, but still. . . . It was one of those strange, dreamlike moments, along with the realization that obviously there was no escape and there would be no walk here either. You just had to turn back on your heel to wherever and forget about walking in this town, ever, or at least for the moment and probably longer- you know how these things tend to go. At least in the city there is always the vague possibility of twisting an ankle as you take a few baby steps and try to navigate the debris along a much too narrow, rubble strewn trail- but still a path- as if this were any consolation.  

As I headed back to the car I began to realize how hopeless the whole thing was. How from now on you most probably always would be running into one of these cone headed detours no matter where you went or how hard you tried to avoid that little army of conical soldiers and their outlying orange troupes as you attempted to take a walk or drive somewhere. Apparently everything everywhere has to be dug up all over again and restarted, rebuilt, replaced; re-broken, re-pounded, re-sifted, re-filled, and re-aligned. Everywhere. This is not fake news, but maybe metaphor. I hope not.  In any event, we seem to be sinking fast.

So how are your sidewalks doing these days?

And the ground beneath your feet?