THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 16, 1996 TAG: 9602150187
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Over Easy
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
Take one major ice storm, 8 inches of snow, a thousand or so miles of roads, half a hundred trucks spewing salt and sand behind them, an equal number of road graders and front loaders masquerading as snow plows and temperatures that go from 60 degrees to 10, then back to 60 in a few days time and what do you have?
Potholes.
Thousands and thousands of tire-eating, teeth-rattling, bone-jarring, spring-busting, alignment-ruining, jagged-edged, not-so-mini-ravines chiseled out of every road, street and parking lot in Hampton Roads.
The only happy people in town are those with names like Firestone, Michelin, Goodyear, Goodrich, Dunlop and Sears.
Among those not happy over the situation is my husband. If we ever get a divorce, it will probably be over potholes.
Bill is a magna cum laude graduate of the ``Potholes are to be Avoided at All Costs School of Driving.'' Given his choice of driving through a small pothole or swerving into the path of an oncoming gas truck, he will go for the swerve every time.
Tractor-trailer drivers have learned to take evasive action when they spot him on the far side of one.
``Breaker, breaker,'' Chicken Man, hauling a load of oven-stuffer-roasters from the Eastern Shore will yell into his CB, ``here comes that guy in the red S10 that Tanker Toad warned us about. Head for the hills, he's comin' up on a ----.''
Then the radio goes dead as good ol' C.M. drops his microphone, puts both hands on the wheel and gets all 18 wheels out of the way of the little pickup with the faded red paint and the ``Support Public Broadcasting'' bumper sticker.
I, on the other hand, have never met a pothole that I didn't want to explore.
I'm attracted to them in the same way that little boys are attracted to mud puddles. And for the same reason. Curiosity.
You can't tell how deep either a mud puddle or a pothole filled with water is from the top.
I've been doing a lot of exploring this past week. ``Wow,'' I said to a passenger as I saw mud flying past my rear window the other day, ``that was a prize-winning pothole if there ever was one.''
``You are stark, raving mad,'' she said as she carefully checked everything from her neck up for damage. ``Hand me your cell phone,'' she demanded.
``What for?'' I asked.
``Never mind `what for,' '' she said, ``just do as I say.''
I handed her the phone. ``Geez, Mother,'' I said, ``aren't you overreacting just a little?''
``If you must know, I'm calling my dentist for an emergency appointment. I think you loosened two of my teeth. And if it hadn't been for the seat belt, you'd probably have loosened my brains as well,'' she said.
And this from a woman who grew up in Maine, the state with undisputed bragging rights to the finest potholes in the Lower 48, if not the world.
Up there, no pothole is considered worthy of the name until it's swallowed several pickups, a Greyhound bus and a 12-car island ferry.
I recently heard that a pothole on the road to the Bangor Airport swallowed a 747 that overshot the runway. I don't know how reliable my source was, but the story had the ring of truth to it.
The local crop isn't that bad yet, but given another ice storm, a few more inches of snow and another 50 road graders with snow plows attached and we should at least have some capable of swallowing several Toyotas and a harbor tug. by CNB