The Super Highway

Well, you can just imagine how we felt. This emotional roller coaster was taking its toll. Faced with the shuttering of the coal mine and now the gold mine fiasco we’re looking at Martini Junction becoming a ghost town. Industry has moved out and the population is in decline. Even the brothel is only open on weekends. What to do? I get together with one of the more open-minded board members and we put our heads together, inside a paper bag actually, and come up with the idea to build a super highway! Not a true superhighway  of course but a demonstration section to showcase the skills developed during the mining era. The idea being to apply for federal funding to complete the project and connect to the interstate system and thus revitalize our community. We would bore through Mt. Gibson and cross Rainbow Gorge with an elevated span and go through another unnamed mountain which we would have to construct. The site of this new mountain was initially a simple molehill and I will tell you, from experience, that making a mountain out of a molehill is no easy task. But we did it and after it’s completion we named it Mole Mountain in honor of the little guys we displaced. Sources tell us that the Transportation Secretary himself is keeping an eye on our progress and the new infrastructure bill has a carveout for projects like ours.

To return to reality for just a moment, we populated our highway with a couple of dozen little matchbox-sized cars and trucks for photo shoots and for the kids to play with. We expected a certain amount of attrition but one afternoon we came out to find all the vehicles gone. That was a surprise but we considered it to be just part of doing business in the woods. Then we came out a few days later and found all of them had come back! We theorized that a child had stuffed his or her pockets with them and when the parents found out they determined to teach the miscreants a lesson and drove all the way back from wherever to return them. Turns out that although that was nice story, the fact was that one kid would stuff everything in the tunnels and them someone else would come along, find them and pull them all out again. Just another woodland mystery.

Superhighway update:

The Superhighway demo project has suffered a serious setback. Either, because of a localized seismic event or just kids fooling around, major highway segments have been dislodged and seriously compromised. At this time it is unknown as to when or if repairs can be made. The Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has expressed his disappointment.