Bypasses on the road of life
Driving down the bypass the other day it hit me. I’ve been here to long. Nothing looks familiar anymore. Who remembers when J. C. Penny’s was downtown next to the only stop light? Vic’s at the north end of Washington was one of half a dozen gas stations in town. Across from the Red Church the “ 76” station closed down and the lot became the locus of a bitter custody battle between the Southland Corp. and the Tuolumne County Hysterical Society. Southland prevailed and Seven/Eleven moved in. Now they too have moved on. Greenley and Sanguinetti Roads were once quaint shortcuts. Now they have stoplights of their own. The Plaza and Junction Shopping centers stand on plots where the grass was once green late into the summer. The old movie theater played its last feature, and even the new cinema has given way to the Signature Ten. A new hospital has replaced the old and in Tuolumne a casino looms large on the horizon.
And now this ugly scar, the result of the emergency East Sonora gastric-triple-by-pass surgery. An operation which promises to relieve severe congestion and prevent bloating of the county coffers for years to come. Straight and level it runs. Looking as if it were carved by a race of space aliens, with no feeling for earthly aesthetics, for landing their intergalactic transport vessels. Are they coming to take me away?
Seventy million dollars to transform the beauty of our county into this? Maybe if they hadn’t moved quite so much dirt the new HI-WAY would not have cost so much
and could have fit a little better into the landscape.
OWL
Oct. 30, 2009
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