Old Decathlon Olympics Journal

October 15, entered Oct. 20th: Unavoidably Late

Friday, October 15th, 2004

My drive to Houston, Texas to met Jessiebelle was exhilarating. This is the longest road trip I have taken in over two years, and it made me realize that I really need to get out more. Although I am an avid reader, nothing replaces first hand experience, and as my trip progressed I felt a gigantic rush of excitement. I felt like I was escaping from some sort of prison, albeit a self-imposed prison.

Visibility was one hundred percent; the skies were a solid sheet of blue, and the sun provided comfortable warmth through the windows of my GMC Suburban. Being that it was a Friday morning, I was not expecting the tremendous amount of traffic flowing in every direction. I knew where I was going and why, but for the most part I couldn’t help but wonder where everybody else was going. Summer is over; gasoline prices are still on the rise, children are in school, and it was not a holiday weekend. It seemed curious that there should be a continuous flow of traffic, but there is was, every make and model of automobile stretched out in front of me during my six-hour drive. The number of tractor-trailer trucks on the road was light when compared to the number I witnessed parked in rest stops. I can only guess, but most tractor-trailer drivers must still do the majority of their driving at night when the traffic is lighter, the weather is cooler, and various enforcement authorities do not monitor speed as closely as they do during daylight hours.

I have been driving for well over thirty-years, and I noticed that there seemed to be an extraordinary number of very expensive, new, and almost new vehicles on the road. The auto industry must be experiencing a selling boom. There was the occasional, familiar clunker, but not as many as I would have thought given the overall condition of the economy and the price of gasoline. I still have not decided if the traffic situation was in anyway related to population growth. Having traveled this same route almost monthly for a year in 1999, the increased commercial and residential growth was very noticeable.

It appears to me that at the current rate of construction that some of the towns that are connected by Interstate 10 are going to grow into each other as if they are suburbs. The boundary lines are blurring. Five-years ago road construction created pockets of heavy, bottlenecked traffic, and I am sorry to report that the situation has not changed. Seems that road construction is a guaranteed constant. From what I witnessed on my trek between Houma, Louisiana and Houston, Texas there seems to be little if any advancement in the technology in road repair and construction. While the on going construction is made clearly obvious by the signs, equipment, and barricaded traffic lanes, the men and women that one would expect to see on an active construction site on a regular Friday workday are still to this day invisible.

State employed road builders’ have been the butt of jokes, and ridiculed for as long as I can remember, and it is still a clear, and richly well-deserved testament. While there are noticeable and notable improvements in the roadways, there is still an amazing lack of actual visible work crews working. The foremost question in my mind is, “How do they do it?”