Over the River and Through Penn's Woods- 259
Hal Wastes His Wages
June 17, 2008

Here’s a fun little fact for you—the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was the second state to ratify The Constitution, doing so on December 12, 1787. On December 13, 1787, the first orange cone was placed on a Pennsylvania highway, and it remains there to this day.

I realize it takes a pretty big set of rims for a New Jerseyan to take a crack at another state’s roads and their travelers, but even the good folks at etrucker.com rank Pennsylvania's as the second worst roads in the nation, having only recently relinquished the top slot in the past few years as Louisiana attempts to recover from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. That’s right—it took two catastrophic acts of God working in tandem to bump the Keystone State from number one (or is it number 50, depending on whether your road is half-paved or half-gravel…).

Hell, I’ve driven clear across the country and I can’t argue with that assessment. Pennsylvania is the only state where you can take a detour to avoid construction, run into construction on your detour, only to reemerge onto the highway in the midst of more construction. You think I’m exaggerating? How ‘bout this flight plan:
We’re on Rte. 81 South coming back from a surprise Father’s Day visit in Syracuse (seemingly you can’t send single malt Scotch whisky in the mail, so I decided to deliver it myself—the bonus to that being I could at least have a wee dram…) when we run into construction around exit 216. Signs say “Seek Alternate Route” so the missus whips out the map (that’s right, MAP! Magellans and Garmins are for gadget-suckling tech-nancies, I roll old school…). We opt for 547 to 11, delivering us in Scranton, well south of the construction indicated by Penn DOT. Of course just before rejoining 81 in Clarks Summit we happen upon a crew of two flag-persons working the road while eight grubby yokels with tanned beer bellies standby leaning on an idle dump truck. After crawling along at a snail’s pace we slide back onto the interstate only to find its again down to one lane for 6 miles, apparently so that one guy in a pick up truck can eat his bag of Utz on the side of the road unmolested by other traffic.

Finally we hit that little strip of road called 380, normally a bit of salvation I like to refer to as Pennsylvania’s Autobahn, for its apparent nonjudgmental stance on speed enforcement. But alas, it too was down to one lane, and since the shoulder had been graded to keep drunken deer hunters from crashing their Dodge Rams into pine trees, there was no escape.

Once we found the open road, we’d get bogged down in sluggish traffic. I find it ironic that people who ride around with NASCAR logos on the back of their vehicles drive like such absolute bitches. I guarantee if Tony Stewart was stuck behind that tool I followed, he’d pull him over, punch him out and scrape that logo of the back of his Dodge Neon. The fact that there are “NO TAILGATING” signs as you approach the Delaware Water Gap always makes me giggle, because you know they’re up talking to pushy Garden Staters eager to get back to Jersey and onto a decent road.

As they say in Pennsylvania, “I ate too many pierogies and cheesesteaks and now I’m backed up like Rte. 80 on a Friday in the summer.”

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Christopher M. Halleron, freelance writer/bitter bartender, writes a biweekly humor column for The Hudson Current and websites in the New York Metro area. He spends a lot of his time either in front of or behind the bar in Hoboken, New Jersey where his tolerance for liquor grows stronger as his tolerance for society is eroded on a daily basis. Feel free to drop him a line at c_halleron@yahoo.com

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