INTERSTATE WHATEVER
By
Jimmy Joe Meeker
First published in The
Wilson County Advocate, Vol. 3, No. Ó12 March 30, 1993 by Donald
W. Gillette
The other day I was driving through Gladeville over a newly-constructed bridge that I suppose will go over I-400 or 840 or whatever the hell that new interstate loop everyone’s so damned proud of is called and I noticed some vagabond standing on the side of the thing waving to me.
Being an ordinarily friendly guy (especially to non-politicians), I waved back and kept going. About the time I was just past mid-way across the bridge, an explosion rocked me and sent that savage little Mazda into a tailspin.
“Good God,” I thought, “terrorists. They’ve found me.”
I got the thing back on an even keel and looked in the rearview mirror. Ten million rocks, the smallest of which was the size of my big Irish fist, were falling from the sky like raindrops on some twisted search-and-destroy mission. While these man-made Scud missiles were falling all over the bridge, I noticed that the waving vagabond had taken cover inside a pickup truck with “Tennessee Excavating” written on the side of it. The rocks were pounding his truck, but he didn’t move. I pulled my surly, little beast (which some advertising agency had the audacity to call a sports car) over onto the side of the road so I could investigate.
What these clowns had done is blow up an area under the bridge so that whoever is building the road could go on with construction. The waving vagabond was an employee of Tennessee Excavating, a company that I can only assume never heard of blocking traffic before they blew a place to kingdom come.
While I stood there watching, probably ten or fifteen cars and trucks stopped on either side of the bridge while four guys with push brooms tried to clean it off enough so traffic could get by. Finally, some other genius decided they’d better get a bulldozer up there and push the rocks off the bridge. The whole thing took about a half hour and if it hadn’t been as good as any Three Stooges film I’d ever seen, it would have pissed me off.
But the entire incident started me thinking about this major road construction that’s going on around the county. Everywhere you look, something’s being torn apart for the Interstate loop. Personally, I hate Interstates. Too many cops, too many of those barbarian half-breeds driving tractor-trailers, and too many old ladies checking their hair in the mirror while somebody in front of them is locking the brakes down to avoid slamming into another old lady putting on lipstick. But I suppose Interstates mean progress and that’s what we’re up to around these parts.
As near as I can figure, this new Interstate loop’s supposed to hook Lebanon up with Dickson. Why anyone in their right mind would want to drive a straight shot between those two places is beyond me, but I think that’s the plan. Anyway, while it’s hooking these two places together, it’s going through Leeville, Gladeville, Smyrna, and a bunch of other flyspeck communities nobody ever goes to anyway.
The bottom line is that we don’t really need any more Interstates—we need to pave the ones we’ve already got. I-40 West to Nashville is pockmarked worse than a teenager working at a fast-food restaurant. Myself, I’d rather not have to have the tires aligned because I went to TPAC than to be able to get to the Glade in ten minutes.
XXX