As much as I was against the construction of a new terrain highway across Southwestern Indiana I have to admit that after delivering a load in Evansville at 5:00 PM, their time, it sure is nice being able to jump on a super highway and cruise back to the yard. The same was true during our recent trip to Texas. We drove straight through on the return. I shudder to think of those last 100 miles over small highways, tired and stiff. And in the morning on my way to work it's grand to have no stoplights to contend with.
It's a pleasant ride too. Well, in town there's the stress of traffic and merging vehicles (I've got some words on that), but the segment from Bloomington to US 231 is gorgeous. The hills of Southern Indiana clothed in trees and spotted with barns and houses. In one stretch of about five miles there is nothing visible except forest; not a road, not a building of any kind, not even a telephone pole or communication tower. It's beautiful, exhilarating, until you remember that this isn't a picture show, that where you are driving, that very spot was until recently forest too. The two sides were one uninterrupted wild space. Do we even know the consequences of disrupting that contiguity, with so little of our forest land left?
The break is a quarter of a mile wide, bulldozed and steamrolled; take off the hilltops and fill in the valleys. When the road was under construction, the trees removed but the grading not yet started, I couldn't see it. Where IN 45 crossed the barren place the hills to the west were too jumbled. How, I wondered, could a highway be put there? They did it, of course. All that is left of that complex geography is the butt ends of the hills leaning back at a lazy angle from the right of way; one big hump on one side, three smaller ones on the other.
Yup, they had fun with their heavy equipment. I sometimes wonder if that wasn't the point, for them. Harmony Road crosses the highway over a bridge that's a hundred feet high, if it's an inch (actual height: 92 feet). The highway climbs toward it, levels off, declines a little before passing under then begins to climb again. I'm not an engineer, have no idea what exigency may have dictated the shape of the present road, but couldn't they have kept a smooth arc, perhaps at a slightly steeper grade, and built a smaller bridge? Maybe they were just playing around with our tax dollars. One thing's for certain: I don't want to be on that overpass during an earthquake.
Nor is it a smooth ride. In this day in age you'd think they'd know how to make the road surface meet the level of the bridges. Apparently not. There was a jarring bump at each crossing, sometimes so severe that it could cause vehicle damage. Over time they've mitigated this effect either by adding pavement, shaving pavement off or both. These efforts have had varying degrees of success. There's one crossing that I still brace myself for to this day.
Oh, I could go on and on, landslides on the shoulder, collapsed coal mine underneath the road, but I fear that I'm merely bitching again. One last consequence of the highway that I want to mention though; what it has taken from me, personally. It's amazing, really, how much industry there is in the Southern Indiana hills: Quarries, stone mills, saw mills, manufacturing of wood products, the Amish and their enterprising endeavors. I spend a lot of time in some beautiful and remote areas. I'd need to get to them via small Indiana highways, winding through the hills. When I was an over the road driver I hated the small highways, they were so much slower and harder to negotiate while I got paid the same as if I'd breezed in on the freeway. Now I get paid by the hour and it's the interstates that I hate, all that jockeying for position among the big trucks and the four wheelers whipping in and out. On the small highways I get to see the countryside, intimate with the passing year. It was on one such small highway that I had my peak experience. Now, however, I just jump on I 69 for the majority of those trips.
