Yield to Progress


As I was driving home the other day I saw a new sign which advised me to "Yield to Progress." Inasmuch as this particular sign is very close to my house I could not help but ruminate on the meaning of "progress" and/or "development" and the implications of yielding to this thing some people call "progress."

I live on an old country road built in the Twenties for a few cars and an occasional farm truck. Just three years ago, looking out my living room window, I saw an alfalfa field and cattle grazing on the hills beyond. Six dozen houses have now taken the place of the cattle, and already, a formidable cinder-block wall and the third-story gables of the new "Victorians" leave little room for nostalgic vistas. Is this what Whitman meant when he sang, "Let the people sprawl with yearning aimless hands?"

Yes, the sprawl and the aimlessness bother me, but I confess, what aggravates me most is the presumptuous indifference to the past and present integrity of the environment and local inhabitants. Must each generation simply forfeit it's standard of living (quality of life) for the next? I suppose this is but a miniscule, and well-deserved taste of what the Native Americans must have felt a hundred years ago as our forefathers ravaged and raped their once precious hunting grounds and living space. My little country road has become a major artery from the colossal sub-divisions to the freeway. I do not exaggerate when I say my life is in jeopardy trying to get the mail out of the front of my box the traffic is so contemptuously fast and close; I had to build a back-door on the thing. I don't even think of trying to get out of my driveway between seven-thirty and eight each morning.

All day I hear the rumble of trucks and the incessant "beep-beeping" of heavy equipment backing up and then the diesel growl as earth caves in to the relentless blade of the D-9 tractors. My house shudders to these rumblings. My trees have been cut for new, bigger power lines; my house is continually dirty from the dust of earth moved rapaciously. (Do you suppose that anyone has offered to wash my house or cars? And do you think all this dirt does not find it's way inside to our cabinets and counters to the extent that we should be stockholders of Endust?) I have lost my view. Three times in three years I have gotten flat tires from ubiquitous, careless roofing nails. My front yard is a repository of the first "Millers" and "Dos Equis" consumed after a hot day of development. A veritable new city is being built up the street and yet I am required to ration my water (while trying to conserve it anyway). Just three or four years ago the road to my house was in good condition and today it is shoulder-less, full of holes, dangerous dips, and a plethora of other automotive insults caused by the merciless, leviathan vehicles of "progress."

The huge gravel and concrete trucks have impacted the old road so brutally that the sewer lines are being crushed. Each time the "roto- rooter" guy comes out (at least once a year) he says the main line in the street is getting lower and lower. Won't be long before it'll cost me about five thousand dollars just to take a leak.

As I was working on the first draft of an article last week I lost it all when the power went off. I sped off into the wreckage of shaven hills and framework cities looking for the culprit. Needless to say, when fury questions nobody knows "nothin". Anyway, I lose my power several times a year now, and it is not the stormy caprice of Mother Nature. Another time, I lost an entire play I had been working on when the power went out. I ran outside and there was the electric company crew standing around a pole; "Oh yeah," they said, "We had to cut the juice to put in these new lines." "Thanks for the warning, " I said, and went back inside to ponder the rubble on my hard disk.

The other day, I just happened to be leaving late for a job and I heard something funny on the other side of my front hedge. I go out and see two guys digging holes in my yard, razing some juniper bushes in the process. "If you don't mind, I would like to know why the hell you are digging up my front yard," I said. "Oh, we're putting up this sign." they said. It was one of those big red signs that warn us of impending delays in traffic. Turns out they are going to widen the road now. I have been asking if and when that will happen for years and all I was ever told was that nobody knew, but "not to worry". Now I know, somebody, somewhere has a map with my house and front yard on it and he has drawn his red line through my juniper bushes. I will be one of those houses you see along the freeway and think, "My god, how can people live with cars and trucks whizzing by ten feet away from their living room window."

Another time, I came home for lunch and there was a veritable company of dump trucks, backhoe and laborers working on a huge hole in the street in front of my house. Optimistic nitwit that I am I hoped that they were repairing my sewer lines. Fat chance. They were installing a pressure-relief valve for the sewer system for the new development across the street. When I got back home that evening there was a concrete box sunk into a hole amidst my juniper bushes. I mean, really! Where does the impertinence end? Nobody even asked me if I minded them using my property to relieve their effluent much less cut away my juniper bushes to do it.

How about these huge Fruehauf tandem gravel trucks anyway, the ones who have impacted my road, the ones with the long, insidious tongue in between? They are everywhere now. What do they care about the integrity and quietude of our neighborhoods? They come and go all day, every day, savagely scheduled to move the earth from one hill to another as fast as they can. Ever follow one on the freeway? Of course, you can't avoid them; and who pays for our windshields? I pulled a guy over once who was spewing gravel all over the road at sixty-five miles an hour and he had the impudence to start to tell me belligerently that that was what I had insurance for. I was ready to show his face what he had insurance for when a guy in a pick-up interceded. Of course, it never occurs to our lawmakers to make them drive prudently, in the right lane, only at a safe speed. Last year, one of those double dump trucks killed a girl here in town. Ran right over her. The driver said he never saw her. Imagine that! Never saw her. He wasn't even cited. Either he was lying or he had no business driving a truck through a community where residents should have explicit right- of- way.

But that is the sort of price we pay for "progress". Of course, this isn't progress, it is warfare. The old against the new. And how is a little old country town going to wage war against the moneyed monarchs of progress? No way. Sure, you stop a Safeway here and a K-Mart there but eventually they overwhelm you with sub-divisions, surround you with walls and turn off your electricity. Sometimes I consider moving. A couple up the road moved here three years ago thinking they had found their Shangri-la, an old established community to their back, the State Park to their north and open fields owned by a private school across the road. They checked with they school and were promised unequivocally that the land was zoned for rural grazing. The school was mis-managed, the land sold and now they will have a bitter view of fifty new houses. I have a friend who got tired of all the "progress" around him, and moved to Idaho. Now his starry nights and blue-skied days, where the deer and the antelope play, are shattered by the sonic booms of Navy F-16's dog-fighting and practice-bombing Sadaams in the sagebrush and sand.

This is not to suggest, by any means, that we yield to this malignancy of progress without a fight. But it will be guerilla warfare. After all, we are only amateurs, each pursuing our own individual agendas every day, as teachers, lawyers, doctors and businessmen while the developers are professionals with one agenda: "develop" what we naively assumed was sacrosanct. They have all been trained to buy off legislators and state and county officials and change laws and smooth-talk the farmers and landowners into visions of financial security through the sale of land. The developers do this day after day, year after year. They are experts taking us by surprise here, tripping us there, making us look like fools as they bulldoze their way across our views, tranquility and front yards. We grab our Winchesters and they turn their rocket launchers on us. We ride out on our horses and face a division of tanks. But, "yield to progress?" Never!