D.O.T. was right all along (August 10)

DIARY

My apologies to D.O.T. and Aunt Esmerelda

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I am beginning this column with an apology.

            Over the years I have criticized D.O.T. (now known as D.T.I. but it will always be D.O.T. in my heart) for its road repair procedures, namely the whimsical filling of potholes, but I shouldn’t have been criticizing them at all. There has been ‘method in their madness’ (from the Shakespeare play ‘Hamlet’) all along.

            (And before I proceed I want to make clear that I have not criticized the ones who actually do the work, the ones we see with shovels. It’s government policy I criticize, and it started in the 1990s.)

            No more though. I now realize that the government and D.O.T. had a Shakespearean method in mind and we should be grateful because they just may have saved lives.

            This revelation came to me last week when D.O.T. workers filled a few dozen potholes on Muniac Road. This was only about three weeks after they had circled the craters with orange paint. At least then we could see where the potholes were.

            As I say, they filled a few dozen potholes and I thank them for that. However, there was one major one that didn’t get filled; I assume this was because they ran out of tar. Grateful for the ones they did fill, I was driving along blithely but cautiously when I spied that last one. Since I had been straddling it for approximately six months, I had no problem this time. Then on to Manse Hill Road, the thoroughfare that runs by our estate, to find that none of the three major potholes or the several minor ones had been filled.

            It was then I realized we should all be grateful to D.O.T. and its child D.T.I. for taking so long to fill potholes, and, when they are filled, sometimes leaving the road as rough as a drunkard’s breath on hangover morning.

            They are making us better drivers, making us pay more attention to the road and so on. It also cuts down on distracted driving. I would say that anyone who can talk on a cellphone or even text her boyfriend or his girlfriend while driving would soon need dentures unless they slow down, way down. There is a legend that one distracted driver going south on Highway 105 just south of the Victoria-Carleton county line went off the road and hit Beechwood Dam, bounced back and became 4:38 pm on the floral clock there.

            Another upside (as they say) to not fixing every pothole is that tourists appreciate it. It’s an adventure for them. They can go back to Ohio, Delaware and New York and brag about the roads they have conquered in New Brunswick, Canada. It used to be that they would kayak down the Lachine rapids, but now they drive on Highway 105. When the New Brunswick government recently came out with a program to attract tourists to that highway I almost fell off my barstool, but it turns out they were smart after all and I was dumber than a fencepost.

            After all I have said about D.O.T., joking and otherwise, I must say they have filled many thousands of potholes, especially between the former Muniac Park and Bath and other places – in fact all over the area. D.O.T. is working on a much smaller budget than they should have and are doing a lot of good work.

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            The following is a true story – well, almost true. I often rail about our being TOO clean, in fact so clean that if we stumble across a bacterium we immediately fall over in a pile. I know people who spray Lysol on every doorknob in their houses twice a day.

            Flug’s great aunt Esmerelda visited him last week just as Flug and I were getting home from town with some lemonade and several boxes of late raspberries. He was unpacking everything and putting the berries into the fridge when there was an almighty gasp from his dear aunt.

            “Leonard Romeo Dollard LaFrance!” she said. “You’ll die of ptomaine poisoning! Wash those berries. What might they have touched in their journey from Perth-Andover to here? I have some carbolic acid in my car. I’ll go get it.”

            Flug, who thinks ‘sterilizing’ is the same as putting food into a bucket and dumping rusty tapwater over it, said: “It’s all right, Auntie. I believe a person should eat a peck of dirt during his lifetime and I’m way ahead.” Esmerelda turned white, fell down and hit her head on a case of lemonade carelessly left on the floor. She just got out of the hospital yesterday. This just goes to show us that being fanatical and obsessive about cleanliness is dangerous to one’s health.

            This morning, in a wild flurry of researching for this column, I went to a health website called ‘Peck’ and read this: “Exposure to bacteria and viral organisms is critical to the development of a mature immune system. By constantly cleaning and sterilising our environment, we don't give our defence mechanisms a chance to grow.” So right.
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