U.S. Highway 46
Like my own father, my mother’s father was also a creative soul. At times a farmer, at times a carpenter, he brought forth many fine things into the world. He took pride in his craftsmanship, he took pride in his eleven children, and he took pride in a Native American heritage that he could never prove. But what I remember most vividly about my grandfather is the time he spent on U.S. Highway 46.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt offered the New Deal up to a desperate America, my grandfather signed on for a Works Project Administration job, building the stone retaining walls that line the highways of Pennsylvania. The stone was brought in by truck from the quarries, and the road crews built those walls by hand, mile after mile, choosing each stone by shape and size and putting each in its place, one after another, through strength of back and arms and legs and unflagging determination.
The weak-willed among them did not last long, but the strong of heart took pride in their work, even embellishing the walls with artful cairns balanced along the top at regular intervals, a testimony to their fortitude. My grandfather was an old and quiet man by the time I knew him, and his hands shook with the onset of Parkinson's. But the walls speak to me of another time, when he was young and strong and fiercely proud. My grandfather stayed with that crew for years.
When people die, we say that they live on in our memories, but our memories live on in things. Jigsaw puzzles and ginger snaps remind me of my father’s father, buttermilk of my father’s mother. Salt and pepper shakers and the apple-shaped cookie jar at a certain rest stop in Vermont remind me of my mother’s mother, but for my maternal grandfather it will always be the retaining walls of U.S. Highway 46.
Sadly, stone walls are expensive to build and are just as costly to maintain. The New Deal has come to a close. America can’t afford to pay for craftsmanship anymore. Those walls are sturdy to say the least. They were built by hand, by people who cared about their work. They stand fast to this day against all manner of wind and weather, and barring catastrophe they will remain as they are for decades to come.
Still, nothing lasts forever, and when it becomes "economically inefficient" to maintain them any longer, I suppose they will be replaced by something suitably cheap – most certainly prefabricated and impersonal – for the modern world. They will be bulldozed and broken, the raw material tragically discarded, precious memories erased, stone by stone. Someday the only stone left to mark my grandfather’s life will be the one in the graveyard. But for today the wall lives. The wall lives, and I remember.
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I Lived Once in My Father's House:
Part 1 of 3
Part 2 of 3
Part 3 of 3
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(I'd like to offer a special thanks to Anne Ritchie for sending in the above photo for the on-going Win-Win Web Scavenger Hunt. It was this photo that reminded me of the retaining walls of U.S. Highway 46, thereby inspiring this three-part series.)
