Man-Eating Potholes

I love spring.  I love most everything about it – green things sprouting, snow melting, birds chirping.  However, spring also brings with it some ugly, nasty things – potholes.  I’m no engineer, but I really feel like there should be some product out there that stops the pot holes from coming.

There is one particular stretch of road around the corner from our house about 4 blocks long that is riddled with potholes.  But not your normal potholes.  It is as if these potholes have learned how to communicate and are working with each other to swallow up that particular section of the earth.  There is one hole that I could seriously lay down in and be completely below the surface of the street.  You can imagine what would happen if you drove your car over that not realizing it was there.  It could seriously break your axle.

The other night we were driving home from dinner and one snuck up on us on the passenger side.  My husband swerved to try to avoid it, but seconds too late.  We hit it, the car bounced, I let out an involuntary “oooh!”, then felt the jar of the impact up my spine.  I listened for the sound of a flapping flat tire because I was certain we had popped one.  We had escaped unscathed…this time.

Last week my running coach thought we should run along this treacherous stretch of road to get to the greenway trail.  It was Wednesday evening and we were running 6 miles.  Daylight is slowly sticking around longer every evening, but I knew it was still going to be dark on the way back.  This four-block stretch is in a residential area of town, so there are sparse streetlights.  Sure enough, I was running back, alone, in the pitch black.  I am clumsy enough when the sun is at high noon.  I had to run very slowly in order to not fall into one of these man-eating potholes. I surely would have broken something had I fallen.  Somehow I managed to maneuver through upright.  Why not run on the sidewalks, you ask?  Because they are uneven, crumbling, and narrow.  The greater of two evils in my mind.

This morning on my way to work, I saw the city workers out scooping the hot mix asphalt into some of the holes.  They will tamp down the mix with the back of the shovel, not really compacting it.  Cars will drive over it, making a depression into the “fixed” hole.  Over the course of the summer and fall, the repair will begin to weaken.  The repair will crumble, and by the time spring rolls around next year, the hole will be back again.  In the exact same place.  No, the workers did not make it over to the hole the size of a Smart car.  I suspect it will be around for a while.  Probably because there’s not enough hot mix to fill up that giant crater leading to the middle of the earth.