Paving Marathon

On October the 15^th the most ordinary thing happened. A field (approximately 135) construction & road work companies lined up along the edge of a city park. Each company had two machines and two machines only: these units consisted of a paver and one 40 foot 18-wheel dump truck and a handful of men – two for the paver itself and one, two, definitely 3 for the dump truck. Oh, and of course the foreman wearing a brown hardhat.

A local boy – about the age of 8, but it’s really anybody’s ball game – fires a borrowed 9 mm glok semiautomatic pistol into a thicket of trees, and the spectators roar.

No less than 5 minutes later, the first dump truck hits the ignition and jumps from 1^st to 4^th gear, causing his crew to collide with the paver. Along the park’s perimeter are water and electrolyte stations that the crews take-advantage-of on this first leg of the race. All the spectators dig in and plant the bottom quarter inch of their heavily textured green and white and pink lawn chairs.

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It’s eleven o’clock @ night on the Sunday two days after the start of the race and the sprinters line up on the paved edge of the park. The local boy releases a bird over a water fountain and cries as he prays Now I lay me down to… Every one of the eleven sprinters and sixty-odd remaining spectators rush the paving crews. The sprinters get stuck ankle high in the tar and skim a pamphlet on how to remove their track spikes. The spectators reach the paving crews before the barefoot sprinters stop for water.

By now the whole town is in attendance.

A handful of spectators glimpse the boy’s bird and pursue it. The surviving spectators storm past the pavers and jut their chests out to cross the finish line two paver links ahead of the field.

After the crews & sprinters cross the line 9 hours later, all the runners will bury the hatchet next to the bird on a short boat ride down the river and back – stopping just shy of the power plant parking lot.