Faith Works 3-24-07
Jeff Gill

We Devastate So We Can Build

If you haven’t recently driven from Newark to Columbus along Rt. 161, I need to warn you about something.

No, not the traffic, which is about as bad as ever, and steadily getting worse at certain times in different directions.

The landscape is devastated, and I really mean that. Even knowing what was coming, with the widening of the highway and the slow spread of orange spray paint on trees and little neon flags low to the ground, then the soil erosion fences near watercourses, you couldn’t be ready for this.

Of course, this being America, there are companies that specialize in narrow sub-fields, so a no doubt fine group of people called “Complete Clearing, Inc.” have taken the forefront. (“Woodchippers, Inc.” is no doubt at work, but they don’t have signage.)

With amazing speed and fearful efficiency, this particular part of the overall roadbuilding contract has stripped the hillsides and margins, buzzed the shrubbery and trees down more efficiently than a boot camp barber, and revealed, almost like a flasher, the naked outlines of the terrain.

Some salvage, and mainly demolition crews, have started in behind the tree chewers and earth movers to tear apart the houses and sheds and barns that flank both the current route and projected track of the four-lane 161.

These half-ruined (probably fully wrecked and obliterated by the time you read this) homes are the most viscerally shocking part of the trip. This may be a personal quirk, but this drive is one I’ve been making with semi-regularity for nearly twenty years. I’ve known a couple people who live along the route, but mostly I have a shadow narrative in my head of what it might be like to live here, and here, and next here, as I drive along.

Do you do this? Reflect on what houses look fun to live in, which farms or stables are part of a life you’ll never live, but fit into a “but maybe” scenario you toss around for a few moments each time you pass? And there have been houses that have always struck me as sad, sad looking before with occupants and tragic now with roof torn off and gaping windows staring crazily past you.

In fairness, some of those houses have been vacant almost as long as I’ve driven past them. But the shift from slow decay to sudden destruction – even that is a bit of a gut punch.

This is how we progress, so called. If cars are not to back up and slow and stop and idle and double pump carbon into the atmosphere, if we’re to get to the restaurant on time to meet George and Martha, if the trucks carrying the latest flat screen plasmoid hyperdrive quasi-3D TVs are to get into Licking County promptly, this is what we must do.

And there are spots, as you pass by and look rudely into the revealed landscape, where you can see that the familiar road itself supplanted another, older, slower, gentler road.

Near Moots Run, just before the Alexandria/Rt. 37 turnoff (where the Col. Scott house stands solitary, the lone reprieve along death row), you can see on the south where bridge abutments, long abandoned, now unbridged, softened by time, perch on either side of the creek. The narrow cut up the bank to the east shows where the roadbed once ran.

Many of the denuded banks of tree stump stubble are themselves the thirty-plus years gone overgrowth, run wild after the current road was thrust through, and I’m sure it looked ghastly then. The slopes drizzled soil, took root in grass, and the untended steeper banks went from shoots to stalks to the clumps of gangly trees that now are mulch.

We devastate, so we can build. Our waste and inefficiency may be more apparent than actual, but you can’t look at such a scene and not think: “is there a better way? What would that way look like?”

In this season, Christians think it looks something like resurrection. There are stones to roll away, oils and spices and unguents to set aside, grave wrappings to clear away, but life everlasting when the site prep is done. The Newark Area Ministerial Association has been kind enough to invite me to preach the Community Sunrise Service at 6:30 am in the Midland Theater Easter morning, and I’m looking for signs of new life and resurrection power.

Maybe they can be found even along the construction corridor of 161. I’ve got to drive it again today, so I’ll let you know.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.