the fifth season

Every morning when I open my eyes to a sunny spring day in South Bend, I ask myself two questions:

1. Will it be warm out today?
2. Which roads will be closed?

See, there's this fifth season squeezed into the year, sometime between spring and summer (and often stretching through all calendar seasons, refusing to die). Construction season.

I've never lived in a place as haywire for tearing roads apart as South Bend. There's never any announcement. You get in your car and drive along a main thoroughfare, in the happy yet stupid assumption that all will be today as it was yesterday, and suddenly there are orange signs, detours, road blocks, heavy vehicles, and men in green and yellow vests milling around appearing important but really doing nothing.

You curse. You follow the detour. Sometimes even the detours have detours. And the repairs -- or whatever it is they're doing (looking for gold?) -- take weeks.

Suddenly your five-minute commute to work takes fifteen. Or your fifteen-minute drive to a friend's house takes twenty-five. Traffic is always terrible. The word "detour" seems to inspire mass confusion among the majority of fellow drivers. They inch along the detour roads, as if afraid of missing the next prominent orange detour-with-an-arrow sign, or as if afraid to trust that the sign really will get them where it promises. You ride people's bumpers. You catch a lot of red lights. You scream.

It does familiarize you quickly with alternate routes to anywhere. You look up and see that familiar orange-and-white barrel and make an instant turn to Plan B. Anything to avoid the detour.

I feel that every citizen of this community deserves a flyer in his or her mailbox. With a calendar detailing each road and intersection that will be closed, and for how long. That way we don't walk out of our homes and blunder into an urban jungle of broken concrete and cranes.