PSA

SOUTH BERWICK, Me. - Better Great than never: The new bridge crossing the Great Works River on Great Hill Road is open to traffic.

The 75-foot, two-lane span, under construction since December, replaces a 45-foot one-lane bridge that restricted river flow and had dangerously low-visibility approaches from both sides.

Great Hill Road, the next-to-last South Berwick road to be fully paved, has seen increased traffic flow as a number of houses have been built on it and nearby Rodier Rd. This brought attention to the former bridge deficiencies despite the road remaining of limited value as a through route. Bicycle traffic also increased after the road became part of the temporary Eastern Trail bicycle route due to ongoing difficulties with bridging and trail quality on the preferred former Eastern Railroad route.

Time will tell if residents' concerns about faster traffic will be realized. A promised 30-mph posting is not yet present.

Sightlines to the new bridge are significantly better than the old due to its greater width and length.

Attractive chunks of granite brace its southeast side.

The wider channel between the new bridge's piers allows the Great Works to flow at its typical languid rate.

The one-lane bridge and its quirks will be missed, but the newness in relative emptiness has its own attraction. As an added bonus, a spilled something on the SW side of the bridge allows passers-by to play Name That Splotch.

A melting Pac-man ghost? Sighted stormcloud? We report, you decide.

Introducing....

Starting soon, Main Streets and Back Roads will be spending a day in each of New Hampshire's 13 incorporated cities. We'll look at history, attractions, restaurants, natural features, and of course transportation. It's fun to research things to do, but even more fun to take others' recommendations. Ideas? Leave a comment!

KCMO - Saturday and Sunday

Continuation of this entry. It's mid-July in Kansas City - very hot and humid, but with AC everywhere.

You don't think about jet lag when only flying to the Midwest, but an hour is an hour so I crashed and woke up early. Looking to make hay before the sun shone, I happily discovered that I was close to the Burr Woods Nature Center. I don't have many rules, but one of them is that when I'm staying in a random suburb and that suburb has "a favorite hiking trail" of the home city, I have to go hike that trail at the earliest opportunity. So, it was off to the Bethany Falls Trail.

It was already 83 and humid when I hit the road around 7:00, ridiculous but not so hot that you couldn't just sweat and forget about it. At first, the trail was very unimpressive and I grimaced at the thought of it being anyone's favorite. The trail was well-maintained and the forest was nice enough, but there wasn't much going on. This was a highlight from an "outlook" from forest into more forest.

Eventually, I came to some really cool limestone outcroppings. Outlaws once hid in these formations to escape the law. I only managed to get blurry photos.

Couldn't you see people successfully hiding around these? I sure could! Images of the land with fewer trees and more grinning rascals quickly coalesced.

After finding my way free of the limestone, I looped back into some prairie meadow.

It was incredibly peaceful. There's just something about meadows.

On the way back, I was held up by a few deer.

Then, I mistakenly offended a fit old couple by talking too loud with the deer within earshot. Oops. Fortunately, this sign brought on more than enough warm feelings to push out the embarrassment. I'd love to visit this site periodically to monitor restoration progress!

I admitted to writing the trail off too soon. Still, I'll take New Hampshire, and I don't think that'll offend many Bethany Falls fans.

Before retreating to the AC, I wandered down to the I-70 overpass near the motel. This had pretty much blown my mind when I stayed here last year and gave me a bit of a shock this time as well.

The overpass is I-70; the lower road is MO-7. I've never seen bridge piers between two lanes of a road before. Exiting I-70 East to the state road north, there are two left-turn lanes at the end of the off-ramp. One goes to the left of the pier, the other to the right. Pretty crazy. My dad speculates that the bridge was built when MO-7 was just one lane each direction and they didn't bother to replace the bridge when MO-7 was widened. Makes sense.

Soon, I headed back to Independence to the Harry S. Truman library and museum. I guess it's too well-known to be a fun fact, but the S in Harry S. Truman stands for nothing. It was just considered to more dignified than no middle name.

I had a great time! The museum seemed to have been built around the goal of showing the public that it's tough to be President, mainly because of all of the tough decision that nobody else can make. There's nobody to pass the buck to. Lord knows I pass the buck often enough at work, so the point was well-taken.

Harry S. comes out looking pretty good, but not perfect, and there's a lot of good 40s/50s and general Presidential history along the way. Did you know that James K. Polk was constantly exhausted because he handled most White House correspondence himself? No wonder nobody remembers him - he was too busy with minutiae. I wondered what curious choices our other presidents had made and wondered why I haven't already read biographies of each and every one.

I'm pleased to make the Truman the first presidential library to receive a Main Streets and Back Roads endorsement. America, f*** yeah!

Invigorated, I skirted downtown and followed Marla's directions to a used bookstore on a commercial strip. It wasn't 90% romance novels, as had been reported, but it was pretty close. All I needed, though, was one copy of Blue Highways; three weeks later, it's already a landmark read.

I changed in a school parking lot and enjoyed the wedding more than I'd expected to. Two Swarthmore alums who I thought didn't care for me were perfectly nice and even saved me a seat. Hopefully I'll remember this next time I have occasion to over-generalize and worry based on third-hand reports. The surprisingly good terms continued at the reception, followed by a quality night of dancing. Almost everyone danced, wine was free, and the DJ played the Cupid Shuffle. Not surprisingly, Alicia killed her Maid of Honor toast. The mood was so good, the 90/humid for the walk back to the hotel was only cause for more laughter.

By Sunday morning, I was feeling comfortable on the road again and hummed my favorite travelling song - also my favoritest favorite Rush song - in the shower.

After successful goodbyes back in Independence, the return trip to the airport was an adventure best forgotten, but we did get a few quality minutes at historic Union Station. It's a major train station rehabilitation success story.

The flight home was uneventful and, after the usual "is the C&J convenience worth the wait?" hemming and hawing, we made it home safely. Would I have remembered however I'd have killed an extra hour or two, anyway? Doubtful. It felt good to have traveled and I was pleased Asheville was only two weeks away.

The Punk Meets the Godfather

I don't drive 95 north into Maine very often anymore; there's little need to when Dover centers the universe. Last night, though, I went spoke-to-spoke from work to Jim's house in Wells. It being the heart of summer, I avoided Route 1 as always.

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There are just so many memory lanes along this route. The first segment, along Chases Pond Rd, brings to mind feelings from the summer of 2007, the first period I drove it regularly. At that time, I was working full-time in Exeter and part-time at Wonder Mountain. Fretting about whether I was working too hard or not hard enough and why I cared so much. Coming down with and getting over mono. Trying to put into context the prior fall's relationship and spring's other. Holding out for Rock of Love / Pirate Master Tuesday nights; we were all working too much to see much else of each other. Excited for...actually, not all that enthused about what was next. Mostly, self-awarely trying to capture some "carefree summer" feel and shut out all of the "what's next?" of starting senior year. 40 minutes of commute each way offered way too much time to be melancholy.

Chases Pond is actually a nice road, passing through some set-back houses on good-sized lots and eventually some York Water District land. There are still a couple of anti-tollbooth move signs up at houses that could be wiped out by such a relocation. I remember more signs back when "the tollbooth is sinking!" was fresh; perhaps outcry has died down since there seems to be a good option that doesn't displace any homes. Still, it's funny how things go from urgent to out of the news; of course, sometimes they resurface with a vengeance.

There are also two opposing "Drive like your kids live here" signs. These exasperate me, but I've yet to find a retort that doesn't make me feel like a jerk. Any ideas?

The route jogs right onto Mountain Rd then left on Greenleaf Parsons Rd to continue paralleling the highway. Not much there. A similar jog right onto Agamenticus Rd (this one comes out at the blinking light in Ogunquit just north of the playhouse) and left onto Josiah Norton Rd, which parallels the more often used North Village Rd.

Remarkably, I am the center of a three-car sandwich on Josiah Norton and pass three cars going the other way. It's remarkable because one of my earliest memories is Dad taking me over when it was a barely passable dirt track passing just one house. Through the years, I tracked new construction and paving activity. After dad moved away from the area, it became a near-ritual for me to drive the road every six months and report on what was new. This summer, I found that it was paved all the way through; Emily later said this was actually done last year while I was out west.

These are pretty positive memories. I have to try to really hard to achieve a "another dirt road bites the dust :-( :-(" feeling and it's not very convincing. Still, it's a lot of work to be a road's historian.

Two new additions are one of those solar-powered highway signs on wheels and a spray-painted plywood sign. The former says "CAUTION SLOW DOWN" and the latter "Drive Slower". I hope the plywood sign was put up by someone who had loudly requested that the road be fully paved. It's like Bennett Lot Rd in South Berwick - what the heck did people think was going to happen? People driving fast on a shortcut back road with a new surface and not a lot of houses - shocking, although I keep it around 35 as I still half-expect the surface to turn to dirt.

As an aside, the road passes near the Josias River; my guess is that Josias is a shortening of "Josiah's" but can't find anything on who Josiah Norton was.

Berwick Rd and the northern section of North Village Rd are benign; the primary memories are of long-ago bike rides.

Tatnic Rd, the main road from my mom's house to inland Wells, brings all kinds of memories. Perhaps the strongest were of the summer of 2004. I was smack-dab in the middle of my Wonder Mountain career and learning (not very well) how to manage people, particularly those older me. Enjoying, and drawing strong feelings from my first relationship, which became my first serious relationship. Getting as much as possible our of the few weeks before Kryzak had to leave for Air Force Academy boot camp with the sense that it may never be this good again. Worrying about starting college like everybody does. All good things, but so emotionally wrought.

I was struck strongly by how we gain and lose ownership over public property. In and around high school, we feel invincible; connected to that power are feelings of having the deepest possible connections to the places and things we care about. No other driver appreciated that stretch of road quite like you did that one sunny spring day with the windows down. No other walker enjoyed that stretch of woods road like you did when you spotted that chickadee or shared a smooch.

I imagined meeting current high-schoolers who drive the Tatnic Rd route, telling them how I used to drive it all the time, and having them think "Yeah, whatever." It's their road now. In some ways, they have far more right to it than I ever did. Red, yellow, and green spray paint adorns one tree where there was a fatal crash. I know about that one, but I soon see a similarly-painted tree on Hiltons Lane. Was there another fatality that I didn't even hear about? My clear loss of grip is momentarily shaking. Not only do new kids have as much reason as me to love the roads every year, some have indisputably more reason - and I don't even know why.

I'm a dinosaur and this hunting ground is tapped out. Time to move on. Fresh, strong memories of a great few days in the new, infinite space of Asheville, NC and points west only enhance the wanderlust. It's fatiguing.

Of course, there are ways to fight back. I put on Quadrophenia, a longtime favorite with so much left to give. The storyline (the mental and physical journey of a rebel youth) has a familiarity and happy ending that is easily grafted onto my own constructed story. And then there's the physical release of drumming along with Keith Moon on the steering wheel.

I love Wells, I don't go there often, and I know I can move somewhere totally new when it's time to. It was a nice ride on some pretty back roads, and lord knows it was better than sitting in Route 1 traffic.