Gully washer exposes a weary highway

Sunday morning brought a gully washer to these parts Down East. The rain came down in sheets, whipped by easterly winds. Some might have called it a goose drownder … or a fence lifter. I called it a gully washer.

Because that’s what it did along Route 1; it washed out the gullies, of which there are plenty, between the potholes and frost heaves.

Where once there was a long, winding two-way highway, now there is a route so ripped apart at its seams that travelers need all-terrain vehicles to maneuver it. And this road happens to be Highway 1, which takes motorists all the way from Canada to Key West, Fla., if they can survive the obstacle course in this region of Maine.

During the winter, the road was bearable. Its cracks and deep holes were filled with ice, snow and sand, and the dirt shoulders were frozen solid enough for the snowplow to wing back and shove the mounds higher on either side.

But March came in like a lamb. And with it, fog moved in to eat up the snow, and heavy rains over the past week cleared the road of its wintry layer, a layer that was thicker by far than any pavement underneath.

After the melting and the runoff, what lay exposed was a rutted, gouged-out washboard of a road so bumpy the shocks on the car are plumb worn out.

Not to mention that the alignment has gone haywire, and the tires are close to blowouts with each and every pothole, some of them large enough to swallow a Volkswagen Beetle.

One of the roughest rides occurs just as the roadway peters out – it’s completely deteriorated – near the banks of a cove separated from the “highway” by a long string of cable. Some might call it a guardrail, but anyone who recently has motored this stretch knows he had better be on guard already or his truck will veer into the crevices, then slide across the muddy shoulder, through the rusted cable and into the tidal flats.

The situation has gotten so bad at least one official in a town along the way is railing against the Maine Department of Transportation for again postponing work on this treacherous section of highway. “We’re not drunk,” he told the press last week. “We’re dodging potholes.”

Add to those the frost heaves, which can send a car careening over roller-coaster rises, and the small ponds created in the dips in the road where low-slung vehicles can literally flood out, and motorists find a byway only the Dukes of Hazzard could love.

Down East residents who depend on this transportation artery for their very lifeblood are stewing about Route 1 all the livelong day, every day they face the drive.

And they’re wondering aloud how folks in government can justify building a new east-west highway when they can’t even maintain the roadways they have. Particularly Route 1A from Bangor to Ellsworth and Route 1 from the Hancock-Sullivan bridge to Sorrento. They’re byways, all right, as in afterthoughts, by-the-ways.