This “winter” has been an anomaly to say the least.
There have been times, while sequestered in our cabin, that I have caught myself staring at the bay watching the sea ducks avoiding drowning by not looking up.
What has it been so far? Thirty-nine days and nights?
Maybe I should be consider building an ark, but I don’t think Spenard’s specializes in cubits of anything nowadays. Plus, the exposed wood lying around the area is so waterlogged that nothing would float much less a condo craft featuring beast-n-things with an inclination to consider each other as a food source.
Come on now. When is this erratic weather going to chill with the schizoid act?
Yeah, I realize that if the ongoing deluges had been snow, D.O.T. would have been drilling access tunnels out East End Road instead of dispatching tow trucks to yank their submerged patching rigs out of potholes the size of Beluga Lake.
Then there is our infamous Kachemak Drive that is scheduled for a new ‘do’ this summer.
Sadly, if this wet-n-warm-n-freeze, repeat, continues, it’ll take cashing out the permanent fund portfolio to lay out a righteous thoroughfare that won’t deteriorate during a sky flush, into something resembling a naval aviation bombing range again. Of course, it doesn’t help that a hunk of the road it is plastered over a 2-inch-deep water table.
I’ve had a plethora of emails and brew-powered voice mails bemoaning the current situation along with multiple inquiries wondering if I remember a little ode I wrote called ‘The Pothole,” back in the mid-eighties.
The writers wanted to know if I found the road conditions as nasty now as when I was firing situational satire from the hip back in the dial-up internet days.
Well no. East End is paved now and presently renowned for tailgating and Daytona speeds when its surface is dry. On the other hand, Kachemak Drive remains a beast when Ma Nature throws a fit.
So, this time around, I have slightly modified the contents of the original ode in order to address the existing situation on Kachemak Drive, which at times, can be difficult to navigate without taking avoidance maneuvers normally utilized during demolition derbies.
Again, my apologies to Mr. Edgar Allan Poe whose poetic vehicle ‘The Raven’ gave me the conveyance with which to ramble on about K-Drive.
Once upon a midday dreary, while I drove, weak and weary
round many a black hole oozing slush and gore.
While I bounced, not nearly napping, suddenly there came a rapping,
As of something not gently rapping, rapping near my pickup’s door.
Only this and nothing more.
Thus I drove, engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
About the road; foul condition burning deeply in its core.
“Who’s fault?” I cried, driving, with head impacting lining
on the ceiling’s overhead binding. Constantly reeling… I then implore,
‘‘Please, K-Drive, nothing more!”
Abruptly stopping, with a shudder, flinging shocks into the gutter
ghastly grim, masked with grit, ole truck, no longer one of yore
it steamed and wheezed, then hemorrhaged antifreeze.
Next off came with hideous screech, the battered passenger door.
Yet, I scarcely more than muttered, “On damn beast, this I implore.”
It merely backfired, “Nevermore.”
Once snarling, dog Luna, ‘tis now whimpering coward
and will not ride since, thru the hole went, her fur buddy Elenore.
I do not miss their yapping, yet wait, another rapping? Rapping near my door?
Whence down the hole where I am sitting, I sense something flitting.
Under steel’s frame quietly easing, then bumping, ‘neath the floor.
“‘Tis an earthquake, nothing more.”
Then the truck rose, hence racing heart froze.
“What horror!” I screamed, then railed, “Not one bit more!”
Yet, it kept tilting, body rising, while I’m surmising,
what monster lurked beneath my dead truck’s floor.
A seismic rupture spewing death from buried core?
T’was a grader, nothing more.
The blade shook me free, then began to flee,
toward yon hamlet, on fire-sparked chains, it tore,
with driver’s wailing yell that he had escaped from hell.
Angrily, I raged, as torrid temper soared,
“I beseech thee sir, heal this apocalypse, we desire a path, nothing more!”
Quote the craven operator, “Never more!”
As of now, the thoroughfare remains spotty, but they still promise Kachemak Drive’s reconstruction money is on its way.
Unless, of course, they need to reallocate a portion of it to cap off the craters strung along the Sterling Highway that are temporarily plugged with the involuntary additions of several Subarus especially around Blackwater Bend.
Update: They continue to employ sonar in search of a sanding truck thought to be submerged on the south side of the bridge.
OK, enough is enough, but we still have March and it could interesting if it hits with the attitude, it did last year.
Nick can be reached at ncvarney@gmail.com if he isn’t helping Turk install an engine snorkel on T’s new 350.
