I went for a walk tonight, eager to enjoy a sunny, pleasant summer evening and clear my head a little from the frenzy of news coverage in which I've been immersed since abortion doctor George Tiller was shot to death Sunday morning.
It wasn't a long walk, really...a little over a mile through the neighborhood that surrounds my apartment complex. I heard the clinks of a pair of men pitching horseshoes in a front yard, the idle bark of a fenced-in dog, the rustle of a woman working on the landscaping next to her house.
But what caught my eye was a torn-up street in front of my complex - or, to be more precise, the layer of bricks that was now exposed as workers had stripped away the decaying asphalt they plan to replace. The bricks were small, packed tightly together, and often on their sides - as if to fill uneven spaces.
And suddenly I was taken back to a story I wrote about paving bricks I wrote as an intern for the Larned Daily Tiller & Toiler nearly 30 years ago now. Larned's side streets are almost entirely brick, and driving over them delivered an almost staccato rumble that seemed to me the automotive version of the lulling clackety-clack of the railroad tracks for a train.
I found myself wondering what year those bricks had been laid, and thumbed through the sheafs of knowledge in my memory to see if I could recall much of what I learned about paving bricks. Bricks used for streets were different than those used for houses, because they needed to stand up to the weight of persistent traffic.
Alas, I couldn't spot any identifying markers in the bricks on Douglas, so all I could do was guess at their age. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they dated back 80 years or more, to the era of the flappers and Calvin Coolidge and vaudeville. Back then, this would have been close to the western edge of the city. After all, West Street is less than a mile away.
Soon enough, they'll be covered up again, by a fresh layer of pavement that's smoother to drive on and easier on tires. But I've long believed brick streets have more personality, and I'll be sorry to see them vanish.
Some years back, when I was going to college in Tulsa, my then-boyfriend came up from there to visit. It happened to be a Friday night, and I'd attempted to explain "dragging Douglas" (I *said* it was some years back) to him, and he decided he needed to see this alleged phenomenon firsthand.
ReplyDeleteWe turned onto Douglas from West, and he declared "My truck has a flat!" Oldest trick in the book, pal, try again. "No, really! Listen!" I couldn't hear anything unusual, and told him so.
I think he went home more impressed by the "The main street in Wichita is still paved with BRICKS" idea than he was with the whole "dragging Douglas" crowd.
And yeah, I miss that stretch of brick too. There's still several brick streets west of Wesley, some with blotched with asphalt patches, others fairly intact, but I'm sure their days are numbered... maintaining/restoring them has *got* to be incredibly labor-intensive.