People at Work #15

About a moth ago  the sign appeared in front of the tree on Los Alamos Road at the edge of our field which I'm fond of photographing. I've put a picture of the sign in extras. Then came the notorious orange CalTrans road construction signs…one saying Road Work Ahead just past the sign by the tree and one saying End Road Work  at the edge of our field. I say notorious because they always mean mess, delay, and noise…Pavement Preservation? What on earth does that mean?

Today we found out…well sort of. I was sitting on the porch with my coffee at about 7:30 and noticed an armada of trucks heading up Los Alamos. We walked up through the field with Ozzie just in time to see a veritable waltz of dump trucks turning on the road above us then backing around the corner and up the road, forming a long line. Normal traffic was being held while the waltz took place. Our talk with the flag person  revealed very little. He just goes where he is sent, he said. He didn't even know that five miles up the narrow winding exposed and somewhat crumbling road is Hood Mountain State Park. Are they fixing the road all the way up? Are they going to do the bottom half of the road or stop right at our street?

I walked back up there at about 3pm, and standing at the top of the trail in just about the place where I took yesterday's picture of star thistles, I watched the whole operation unfold. The first dump truck in the line stretching up the hill pulled forward in front of the pavement destroyer vehicle. You can see the dirt roadbed behind the pavement destroyer and the stream of crumbled asphalt and dirt being directed through its long snout into the back of the dump truck as the whole parade moves slowly forward. As each dump truck becomes full, it moves off and the next one in the line up the hill pulls forward to take its place .

The whole operation is accompanied by a lot of grinding, beeping and tooting as the trucks seem to communicate with one another through some sort of air horn Morse code. It's all quite fascinating.

We still don't know what the grand plan is or how long the operation will continue. It does bring about a bit of deja vu however, as one of the last things that happened while we were still living in Berkeley was that they replaced the road at the end of our street.