Trunk Line

“All we know is it’s dark down there.”

HALFACAT, Indiana —Local officials remain stumped by a pothole with no apparent bottom on Ferndog Pike, near the intersection with Poady Road. According to Rusty Midfoster, Street Maintenance Supervisor for the city, “We get a lot of potholes here, but most of them are small and hold water, but this one I don’t know. We dropped a cone in it and didn’t hear a splash. Or anything.” At press time, the city’s Special Projects Coordinator and Director of Street Operations were preparing to publish a new QR code to replace the one that replaced the pothole tip line that was replaced by an email address in 2022. It should appear soon at halfacat.in.gov/you-report, where non-emergency forms can be filled out.

Joshua trees shot in pano mode by a phone in a moving car.

I’m making lemonade here. The lemon is erroneously putting an album of photos shot at Joshua Tree National Park into my Flickr site devoted to infrastructure rather than the one for everything else. The lemonade is giving this blog some juice in the form of a useful topic: absence of infrastructure. There is a lot of that in the world, and this park is an okay example.

I say okay because it’s not Antarctica, the middle of the ocean, or the Taklamakan. There is a paved road, on which tantalized visitors can gaze through car windows before they hike off on foot to look at wildlife, climb rocks, and enjoy other adventures. There is also some cell coverage, even though the park says there is none. We could get online most of the way to the Wall Street Stamp Mill ruins. Two days earlier we took a hike to Barker Dam, which also featured a bit of cell coverage.

Just off the trail nearby are the remains of a windpump style windmill, that supplied water for the mill and the ranches nearby. Not sure what anyone ranched there, but the windpump made a degree of civilization possible. And I suppose that’s what infrastructure is: a minimum requirement for the kind of life we call civilized.

Thoughts welcome.