"The Road Taken" ...
with apologies to Robert Frost ...
Two roads converged in a yellow plain
and sorry I could not travel both
so l looked down Rockwell, espied a train,
then looked further west
till pavement regained
its tenuous hold on Amarillo's growth.
Once upon a time there was a city of modest size called Amarillo. Now, Amarillo was located in the middle of the Texas Panhandle, known for its political conservatism; taste for small, efficient government; and wise use of taxpayer money - the recent constabulary and Tulia fiascos notwithstanding.
Now it came to pass that Amarillo began to grow toward the south, and in the not too distant past, it made provisions for this urban sprawl by constructing a grid system of roads to carry the additional traffic.
An important part of this modest infrastructure, Rockwell Road, provided a short but key connection between Georgia to the east and Soncy to the west, a total distance of approximately four miles, all of which was paved except for a smooth gravel section between Georgia and Western used mostly by local residents.
During the fifth year of the third millennium C.E., some amorphous Bureaucrat saw this happy state of affairs and was not pleased. And so one morning, the local neighborhood awoke to progress in the form of pavement. And so the pavement was put down, rolled; the Bureaucrat saw it, and proclaimed it good. And it was good - for a few days at least.
News of the newly paved section of Rockwell spread like the news of Britney Spears' recently denuded cranium. It soon became apparent that the power(s) that be had decreed that Rockwell be paved with asphalt millings, a fine paving material for lightly used surfaces such as driveways but completely inadequate for a new east-west bypass.
Massive potholes - sinkholes, actually, like one would find in, say, Florida - appeared, and soon one could only travel Rockwell in a passenger vehicle at the risk of either being swallowed by a mammoth pothole or squashed by one of the 18-wheelers that now regularly traversed the thoroughfare.
One day the Bureaucrat learned of this and ordered city road crews to fill the potholes with asphalt. The local residents nervously watched the repairs with a mixture of trepidation and hope - the former because of fears of additional heavy truck traffic; the latter because they were somewhat mollified that the necessity for monthly front-end alignments might cease.
It took less than a week for the 18-wheelers to tear out the new asphalt patches and create new potholes. Local government worked efficiently and used taxpayer money to repeat this process twice more, with the same result.
Eventually our Bureaucrat - for it is too painful to imagine a committee making these decisions - decided it would be best to smooth the road by covering the potholes with dirt and then grading it, creating what appeared to be, once again ... a dirt road.
But not quite. For now this stretch of Rockwell had all the disadvantages of dirt (dust, mud, etc.) and of pavement (heavy truck traffic and potholes). Indeed, the road became so bad that a significant number of vehicles began to detour through the once peaceful neighborhood of Homestead Ranches, making it unsafe for area children to ride their bikes during periods of peak traffic.
So the locals settled into a sullen state of resignation as their government worked efficiently and used taxpayer money to recreate the "dirt" road no fewer than five times between the summer of 2006 and February 2007.
And then on a beautiful February morning in 2007, the residents of the Rockwell-Georgia neighborhood awoke to the sound of road crews busily removing the remnants of the failed asphalt millings paving debacle. After no fewer than four days of constant grading, the surface was reasonably smooth and this stretch of Rockwell had been transformed once again into a ... dirt road, almost equal in quality to the original before the "repairs" had been initiated.
And the story ended happily, or so the locals thought, because they could once again rest easy, their faith in local government finally restored and their once vital connection to Interstate 27 having been repaired, or at least returned to the dirt from which they themselves had been formed. Tranquility reigned throughout the land, or at least the neighborhood.
And as your author thanked the crew of one of the graders for finally repairing the road, the operator just grinned, nodded his head knowingly and said, "We're fixin' to pave it this summer."
And somewhere our Bureaucrat smiled, and democracy wobbled a little closer to the abyss.
Byron E. Pearson, an associate professor of history at West Texas A&M University, is the single father of two boys, ages 8 and 7, who are avid bike riders.