Is
there an Oscar for the worst pothole?
by
Robert LaFrance
It’s official. The 2014 Oscar for
the Worst Pothole in southern Victoria County, NB, is about to be presented and
it will go to the one on East Riverside Drive, Perth-Andover, near Uplands View
(RCMP Street as my wife calls it).
I should quickly explain that this
Oscar may be misnamed a bit, because one of the criteria is also the length of
time the pothole remains in place, apparently invisible to whatever government
department is supposed to fill in those minor canyons. Perhaps that’s the
problem; Premier Alward hasn’t created a Pothole Department. It isn’t the
Department of Health – I checked – and the people at Advanced Education say
it’s not their baby. I just can’t figure out who should be fixing HIGHWAYS so
that the TRANSPORTATION of citizens is made easier. It is part of the
INFRASTRUCTURE.
It is a complete mystery to me how a
pothole in a well-travelled road – Highway 105 which is also the main street of
Perth – can remain in place for months with no apparent effort made to throw a
few pails of cold-patch tar into it. I know, the excuse is always that it gets
beaten right out in a couple of weeks, but surely it is not rocket science
that, once it gets beaten out, you fill it up again until the hot-patch season
arrives.
It has also been a mystery to me for
many years that Highway 105 is so ignored when pothole-filling time comes
around. While my concern is a selfish one – I travel on it several times a week
– there are surely many hundreds and even thousands of people other than me who
don’t deserve to drive over what my grandfather would have called ‘a twitchin’
trail’, meaning a path fit only for yarding logs by horse.
The fact that the ‘powers that be’
for our highways department are located in Edmundston (Brilliant!) might have
something to do with the fact that Highway 105 is so bad. Let me make a guess:
the secondary roads near Edmundston are in excellent shape and potholes there
get quickly filled without an Act of Legislature.
*****************************
Here is another tidbit from the
notebook I carry around with me:
My old friend Ganderson, originally
from Gander, owns a farm just down the road (I should mention that when you
live in a hill, everywhere is ‘down the road’.) and he is the original
Law-Abiding Citizen.
It’s disgusting. He has never, in
his lifetime, gone through a stop sign, or even done a rolling stop, which is a
little disconcerting to those who tailgate his 1983 Gremlin. Nobody realizes
that he is actually going to come to ‘a full and complete stop’ because no one
else does. He has gotten quite a few insurance cheques because of that.
To digress for a moment, Ron Ganji
smashed into the Gremlin’s bumper in early June last year and Ganderson insisted
on ‘putting it through the insurance’ as he said. His cheque was $814.67. The
body shop guy charged him only $710. Ganderson sent back a cheque of $104.67 to
the insurance company.
What I was going to say, before you
dragged me off-topic, was that Ganderson’s little farm in Lower Kintore is
partly on the east side of the road, and partly on the west side. On Tuesday he
was faced with a conundrum: he needed to move his pickup truck from one side of
the road to the other, but the truck wasn’t licensed.
You guessed it. With the Gremlin, he
drove up to Service New Brunswick to get a licence for the pickup, then was
told he had to have insurance, so he called his insurer and paid $55 for
temporary insurance so he could obtain the registration. Then, just before he
was to take the pickup truck across the road, he noticed that the safety check
had run out. He phoned a mechanic and got him to come to his, Ganderson’s,
house to check out the vehicle which proved to be short of a working hand
brake. The mechanic was willing to put on the sticker anyway, but Ganderson
wouldn’t hear of it. He asked the mechanic to put on a ‘rejection sticker’ so
he could drive the car into town and get the required work done.
By the time he was done there, the
bill was $109.14 and Ganderson was pleased that he hadn’t compromised his
ideals. Back home again, he drove the pickup truck over to the part of his farm
on the opposite side of the road from his house and brought over ten square
bales of hay for his horse. He parked the pickup truck back in the barn where
it would probably stay until the late summer. Total bill for all that?
Somewhere around $300, but the important thing is, he didn’t break any laws.
I understand his relatives are looking into nursing
homes.
-end-
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