Monster Trucks

The first team arrives promptly at 7:30am, a virtual parade of tree service trucks hauling all manner of implements of destruction.  They slowly rumble and grumble up the street, park a little haphazardly on either side, and spill out a couple of dozen little men in neon yellow jumpers and hard hats.  The neighborhood dogs erupt in unison but are quickly drowned out by a chorus of chain saws and the whack-whack-whack of a compressor.  All this is followed by an encore of an astonishingly loud and discordant wood chipper.

The second team is here by 8:00 and adding to the organized tumult by 8:30.  More chain saws, a second wood chipper, an even louder compressor and what sounds like a half dozen jackhammers.  It goes on all day for three solid days, then all weekend including Sunday, and then Labor Day.  You’d think they were clear cutting 40 acres on the back forty instead of trimming one dead end block.  By the holiday, I realize I’ve gotten a little oblivious to it and I only notice that by quitting time, the silence sounds odd.

When they paved the roads on the island one early summer, people turned out in droves to see the heavy equipment at work.  Many had never seen anything fancier than Mr. Melanson’s tractor and hay maker and most didn’t appreciate the noisy invasion of man and machines.  The road crew came on the first ferry each morning and left on the last each night, leaving the bulldozers and earth movers and tar makers parked wherever they happened to be at the end of the day.  We were fascinated by these monstrosities, the cement mixer in particular made a grand playground, until one of the younger Albright boys took a tumble off it and broke his leg. The whole area was immediately put off limits to anyone under 18.

If I’d been older, I might’ve understood the adult resistance to all this macadam.  There was something sad about losing our dusty dirt roads and the stories they knew.

Progess, Ogden Nash wrote, is a fine thing but it’s gone on too long.