After the game last night, a friend asked if I'd like to go site seeing. "Around Wink?" Why not? I've lived here for nine years now and believe it or not, I've not seen everything there is to see. This friend took me on dark county roads that led out to the Wink Sink number two and on past it. What was truly freaky was that as we were riding, the road felt like a roller coaster. Uneven pavement, deep recesses, and cracks littered the road.We stopped to examine the cracks. There's been talk that the road would soon have to be closed. I wondered why since the cracks weren't so bad. That's when the scary part happened. "We don't know how deep these fractures go. We don't know what's underneath us or what isn't." I bent down and slid my hand down into the crack present on the surface of the road. The surface is incredibly misleading, the broken pavement only showed a gap of a few inches, but as my hand slid through I felt nothing beneath the asphalt, only air. I pushed my arm down further up to my elbow and waved my hand around and still felt emptiness.
The picture above is of a surface crack. What I experienced last night was nothing like that at all, it was a penetrating fracture in the surface of the Earth. Driving home last night, knowing that in some places solidity was no longer there, was giving me the feeling that I was sitting on top of a ticking time bomb, but instead of it exploding and going out, I was just waiting for it to implode and cave in.
4 comments:
Yikes. What if a snake or a big bad spider was lurking in that crack? What is holding up that asphalt? I think I'd stay off of this road.
Ha ha, I realized the foolishness of sticking my hand down into that crack only until after wards. I'm rather impulsive at times. That particular part of the road is off the main HWY and it actually has been shut down to the public...I was given a private tour. I'm not sure what's holding up the asphalt...aren't there iron rods in roads?
Forget spiders (of which I am so scared of!) and snakes, what if there had been a giant fire-breathing monster under there!?!?!? That's scary! I won't lie, I kinda wanna see it, though!
I think there is only rebar in concrete roads. The oil roads on our land are leveled ground covered by compacted gravel, then crushed rock, then covered/sealed with asphalt and oil and compacted with that roller machine thing. Each layer is only a few inches thick!
You're right Jovan, I hate it when they re gravel & oil the roads...for days you get that clicking banging sound in your tire wells.
Well, if I'm gonna face a fire breathing monster, gonna need my Lancealot after all.
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