Highway Construction Cone

New City-wide Identification Symbol

Dear Mr. Editor

Don't mean to rant, but a few observations that my wife and I have noticed concerning the road system laid down in our fine city so far in this long and grueling summer of travel. First among them, there are now no roads left to travel on, which makes leaving our home in the morning difficult. Second, that there is now no viable way for my children to move along to their respective rigorous extracurricular activities without losing at least one bike tire per ride. Third, that unless the coordination of city, state and federal dollars begin to work together somehow a bit more closely, there is no real end in sight, and that we may all be reduced to creating our own at-home-businesss (with the assistance of the gov't I suspect? Farmers may still be able to operate considering the gigantic size of the rear wheels on their John Deere tractors, which should compare nicely to the size of the wheels of the very construction machines needed to travel over the five foot high trenches that line the city.  Somebody called us the new Midwest Venice of no-water?).

A neighbor recently made to us the wise remark that if those predicted-to-exist aliens arrived in the La Crosse area, they would surmise that all those four-wheeled blocks of steel (cars) inching alongside those "very well planted orange trees and shrubs," on rough dirt tracks next to those "dinosaur-like blocks of steel" (bulldozers, cranes, utility trucks, we can only suppose), would wonder why we don't all just use that one remaining wide open channel of moving transportation available (Mississippi River we assume the alien would be thinking here).

The aliens would see the glum faces set inside the blocks of steel – so many of them holding white puffing sticks – yelling out unusually loud messages to the men with orange discs on their heads, that this would probably be seen as the chief mode of communication in this area of the earth.  We told our neighbor that we could only hope that the aliens had along with them a more efficient road construction crew and might even set us up quickly for air travel so we could get to work on time this year still.  All of this is too bad considering the strong history of road building we have here in the coulee area.  As we made an attempt at driving to our daughter's softball game last night – thinking blindly, again, that we might get there on time through a parade of work zones – we remarked on all the roads that used to be useful, like hwy. 16 (now blinking orange neon sign assures us of construction to come June 14!) and that scenic highway on the south side of town, 33, where we dodged and weaved moon craters to finally arrive at scheduled field, now reduced to a lane so narrow it turned even an elderly motorcycle rider to a road-raging Evel Knievel.

In our final humble opinions, we had always hoped that road construction might be done in a sort of orderly manner – a couple of roads at a time, and that perhaps there was a supervisor of some sort in the background holding a giant blue print grid with a grand plan that allowed for some traffic movement here and there.  We have now been proven wrong.  Maybe the aliens are in charge.