Pirouette of man and machine

When the construction crews arrived to repair the road in front of her house, the 'ballet' began.

By Dawn Goldsmith

from the May 2, 2007 edition

Page 1 of 2

After years of listening to the mind-numbing, truck-rattling ka-thunk, ka-thunk of tires hitting potholes in the heavily scarred road in front of our house, I felt euphoric. Winnebago County, in rural Illinois, had finally scheduled major road repairs, including drainage culvert replacements.

The Road Construction Ballet, as I have come to think of the troupe of workers who arrived one bright summer morning, would perform in front of my home.

I wanted to burst into a rendition of the "Hallelujah Chorus."

Instead, I nonchalantly meandered down to the end of our driveway to watch. Our property, located at the bottom of a V, was key to handling water runoff. Through the years, the culvert in front of our house had filled with soil that had washed down from cornfields and properties located uphill from us.

The roadworkers would remove the dirt, cracked cement, and old asphalt – and then shape and fill in the road edges for the next phase of the construction.

I grinned and waved at the lone man without a machine. He carried a can of spray paint and a shovel. He, the maestro, shook his baton – I mean, spray can – and tapped his shovel. He looked insignificant next to the three-foot-wide maws of the backhoe's hinged bucket or even the more conservative scoop of the Bobcat.

I motioned a request to watch, and he answered with an expressive shrug that conveyed, "Yeah, yeah, just stay out of the way."

Then, with no wasted motion, he waved a large 18-wheeler dump truck into position beside the backhoe.

The performance began.

Gingerly the backhoe sat on its metal treads in what had been the waterway that separated my front yard from the road's edge. The rotund man who sat like a king on his throne in the behemoth road-eater's cab moved his hand forward and the machine responded as though it were an extension of his reach. It stretched its mighty Erector-set neck upward and forward and then downward before using its massive teeth to tear out a chunk of the cement culvert.

As easy as a child grabbing a handful of sand, it tore away the dirt and stone and lifted it skyward. Gulping the mouthful and then swinging smoothly toward the semi-truck, it spat the bite into the empty bed.

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