This week I had several appointments across town and for the first time in my life, sat down before I left with pencil and paper to strategically plan when and where I would make my exits and entrances in order to arrive on time. That is because right now there is not an intersection in our city of Evanspatch Indiana that isn’t under some kind of construction. Since there is no predicting where the next delay will begin or end, whether it will be a part of my strategic plan or not, I just closed my eyes and like playing a Ouija board, let my pencil wander aimlessly across our city. It’s a lot like that driving around here, never knowing whether at any turn I’ll be re-directed by an outside force.
So, if you thought you were going to get an easy ride through this podcast, that the trip was going to be the shortest distance between two points, then you may need to pack some extra Goldfish or Sour Patch kid snacks before you leave.
And Hello there! I’m Jeff Bender and you’re on a road trip today on Knee Deep, episode number 107, so buckle up and set your GPS to Instagram at authorjeffbender or go to my website at Jeffmbender.com and as we like to say here at Knee Deep, don’t forget the M as in more please!
It’s a given that most cities go through some road transformations over the summer – fixing curbs, spraying new lane lines and cleaning up leftover sludge that collected in the gutters over the winter. In addition, our city usually takes on a pet project like a new turn lane or round-a-bout that revitalizes the flow and gets rid of old trouble spots and bottlenecks.
We locals also know that by Fall, great swaths of potholes will have been repaired on our roads in readiness for the upcoming winter, along with a new stretch of the Hoosier Scenic Bike Path. By now, we are used to seeing yellow-vested workers standing around talking to each other waiting for the right moment to move a pile of asphalt back where it was yesterday, and multiple lanes of traffic trying to squeeze into one. It’s just part of the sweat equity we drivers put into our local culture – those road repairs that have to be made to maintain the ebb and flow of the go–and–flow.
However, (and in my world, howevers are very common) in the last few months, our fair city of Evanspatch Indiana has become a traffic nightmare. Every place I’m used to making a turn is not a turn anymore, and all the usual routes I’m used to taking have been re-routed. Thousands of Evansvillianites are doing the same thing, backing up, turning around after getting stuck trying to find a way out along a side street. I see faces pressed to the windshield as if drivers are in a state of signage overload, inching along in a GPS fog. They ask, “Where am I, and how in the name of metropolitan transportation did I get here?”
I don’t know the facts, but I’ve heard rumors that our city was offered a ga-billion dollars by the state DOT if they’d tear up every main artery going east or west. If that is true, what should be a speedy trip across a medium sized town has slowed to a turtle’s pace this last summer. Like splotches of measles, construction obstructions every other block has left drivers looking for some quick and clean escape that gets them around the clogs, backlogs and the ubiquitous but ever-present Shetland sheepdogs.
Then, unfamiliar with the new route they find themselves on, drivers get impatient and angry, and well, you know the story, create new traffic nightmares that look more like stadium parking. Angled autos wait to make their move, and red lights don’t make a difference because intersections are packed with cars that tried to make the yellow.
I think some of our problem stems from a long, slow burning dysfunctional traffic history, one that began when the Ohio River decided to do the hokey pokey and bend itself about, which dictated that our city would grow along a long curve and eventually divide into several, if not more, distinct areas, all of which developed their individual labyrinth of street patterns and traffic puzzles. If you are a subscriber of Dispatches from Traffic Madness, a local newspaper, you probably know that about thirty years ago our town decided on a one-size fits all solution to our driving enigma by building a superhighway over the top and through the center of those patterns and puzzles. We named it the Lloyd Expressway.
For the most part, that metro zip-a-long was to replace Division Street, an old thoroughfare that connected businesses and barge stops with an intersecting railroad line and of course, automobile traffic. Why it was named Division Street, I don’t know, because it doesn’t divide much of anything that I can see, except those that would rather travel at a lower altitude, below the newly built Expressway.
Strangely enough, Division Street was not torn down, but remained to run parallel to the highway, but down below it. Like a little kid that tags along his bigger brother, Division became a kind of alternative car route – the Expressway’s buddy. Mind you, Division Street is not a service road. I know what they are – I’ve seen those in cities and they are really for kids who ride those miniature BMX bikes and people who suddenly realize they drank too much coffee and have to exit the highway for some privacy below under the overpass.
No, this Division Street, the one that doesn’t divides anything, was actually left there to give hope to those on the new Expressway should they get frightened travelling at a high rate of speed and need a place to retreat. Division, the road with slightly lower ambition and purpose was ready and waiting down and over to the side below.
As those drivers exited and submerged into the sub-city, they slowly gained back their composure, felt back in control again and reassured. Their blood pressure lowered, their heart rate decreased. They could breath again and take another handful of their Goldfish snackipoos. And best of all, they could still look up and catch a glimpse of the real highway above them, see traffic moving along at a good clip, and know they still had a viable option if they wanted one. Division was the kind of quiet guarantee that we Hoosiers from rivertown are used to having. And then, if a driver starts to feel left behind, or lonely, or has a moment of lapse or a spiritual stroke of some kind, they know that there is a great highway up above them, one they can access in a flash and escape the Hell they’ve been living in down below on a road that is named after something that was never divided at all but says it is.
Are you catching the pattern here? Exit or merge, merge or exit. When we get in our car to go somewhere, that kind of wishy-washiness works for us. We believe in gravity, yes, but we don’t want to be committed to it. We like the option of being able to rise should the need present itself. Most of the time it doesn’t, but there’s that bit of hope here in Evanspatch for that to happen, so we stay open to it, rising to get on the highway, then speed along until our energy and courage run out and the Distressway is just too much to handle and then down we go again to our divided, darker side, the road of almost good intentions.
For us, having dual roads that are equally dysfunctional give us that opportunity to lower our expectations at a moment’s notice, should we need to adjust to what we perceive as challenging. We may or may not have left the dog some food in his dish when we left this morning, we may have yelled at our kids as they got out of the car for school, our wives may have used our best screwdriver to pry open the mayonnaise jar, but it’s ok. – we’ve got two roads in Evanspatch that don’t change, that are both less travelled, and we can take either one of them and know the Midwest will survive the change and that the mayonnaise jar will open when we get home.
As you might imagine, having a major artery slash highway with a street running parallel to it has a practical advantage as well. If you part of a family that is not getting along very well, you can split up into two cars if going across town, one half traveling up above on the Expressway and the other half traveling down below on Division Street. As a result, If you come here, you may notice about twice as many cars out at night than in any other city in the United States. That is because families that split up earlier in the day are still out there driving around trying to connect with the other family car. Some of those families drive all night long, up the Expressway and down to Division and back again, playing endless loops of Cocomelon, leaving stuff animals behind as a signal that they were just there. Inside the minivan, kids are eating nonstop out of nervousness, chicken nuggets dipped in ranch-style dressing, waiting for a glimpse of the other family car coming up the next on-ramp.
It’s an ongoing little festival really, part of the culture here, a kind of all-night bonding exercise, like having a three-foot lager beer in an Irish Pub if you’re Irish or getting your picture taken next to a pack of wild dingoes in the Australian outback.
Here in Evanspatch, we get on the Expressway to find each other, so we can have a culture. We put up with the ga-billion dollar state grants that leave our highway infrastructure a preposterous labyrinth of jogs, and bogs and sheepdogs.
We look down off our Distressway, we see the other half of our family moving along at a snail’s pace, throw them some goldfish, or a couple of Legos, pull over to pick up the headless pink teddy bear our other car threw out the window, and then sigh and creep along until the next exit. No, if you are visiting, you’re not going to find our highway listed as a tourist attraction on the Evanspatch Chamber of Commerce map. No, you’ll have to get on the Expressway and discover it, like we do, by your natural human inclination to rise and fall. We natives like to call our dual highways, “The Road Less Travelled and the Road Travelled Even Less,” two road running parallel to each other doing the same thing, a little slower and slower each year. But hey, if you don’t make it this year, don’t worry! Until our supposed state grant runs out, neither road is going anywhere…very fast.