Bifurcated Houses

The hours between 6:30 and 7:30 are pretty quiet on the road I drive.   There are a few other early morning commuters like me, but the majority of the traffic is transport trucks.  There are the usual chip trucks, and other multi-axled delivery vehicles working hard to keep our consumer society happy.  What has struck me though, since the first day almost a month ago is the number of modular homes heading east every morning.

You first know they're coming because of the flashing lights of the wide-load pilot vehicle; then comes half a house, balanced on a flat-deck, like an overweight diner perched on a picnic bench. Invariably it seems I meet them on a tight corner, or where the cliff goes straight up and straight down.  The half is closely followed by its mate and the twin pilot truck at the back, completing the parade.  There has easily been one of these almost every day, always going east.

Other evidence has made me think that somewhere to the east there is a suburb being built.  Like the baseball fan in WP Kinsella's "The Thrill of the Grass" who secretly plants real grass in Wrigley Field, I think someone is surreptitiously building a subdivision.  It isn't just the yin/yang houses but trees.  The first time I saw the massive tree on the back of a truck I had no idea what I was seeing; something big, long, and lumpy swaddled under a tarp with branches sticking out the back.  It was the third or fourth time that I realized it was a tree, or perhaps trees being transported from nursery to an adoptive home.  I can see them pandiculating as the tarp is removed and they are set into the earth to continue their lives.

The obvious thought would be the construction of a neighbourhood to the east, but what if it is in fact the dismantling of a neighbourhood to the west. Perhaps a house by house exodus of disaffected west-coasters who have lost their will to keep up the fight. This thought arises with the third, frequent, and modestly unusual transport load I see on a regular basis, again heading east. Flattened cars.  Every couple of days a I swap wind with a flat-deck loaded with flattened cars; their purpose made redundant only to be re-purposed in the spirit of ecology.  When I was young I remember my dad talking about going to see Sam the car crusher at work.  I don't know where the name Sam came from, but ever since then, when I drive by metallic graveyards I think of Sam and while watching this interrupted convoy I find a warm memory.  It creates a pretty interesting picture when they are all put together, the houses, the trees and the pancaked cars;  new beginnings, relocation, the end?