Is street repair easy to get in your town?

This is one of those quick posts which could easily be replace with a photo, but it happened so fast that I nearly blinked and missed it.

I awoke yesterday am (yes, brother, it was still am) to the awful noise of buildings being torn down, or maybe it was Mike cleaning his bbq cooker with a new kind of scraper, or perhaps it was the sound of yet another car missing the 15 mph turn and scraping its way over the cliff (2 since we moved here seven months ago, but that's another post).

The worst of the noise soon quit and I forgot about it until I got to the post office, when Laura (the postmaster, and she is indeed a master with the post office, but that too is another story) asked me what that noise was coming from the quilt store. I might have panicked, matching some horrible grinding noises with the quilt store, but since I have found no cause for panic yet at Port Gamble, I wasn't going to start now. So I promised her a full report, and headed toward the noise and  the quilts.

I soon found what the noise was. Half the street was torn up and being loaded into a truck to be hauled away. For what reason? I assumed because of faulty underground wiring or septic system, or some part of the grid work under the street that was failing. I've been told that the streets belong to the county, so I assumed that the failure was near catastrophic. And then I saw Tom, our chief of maintenance, and as always I expected a full and accurate report, and I got it.

Have you ever noticed that every once in a while a slab of asphalt will get some cracking in it, perhaps from some soft dirt underneath, or perhaps some heavy trucks from above? The asphalt is still good, can be driven on for years, and no one replaces the street because it LOOKS bad. No, but they do replace the street at Port Gamble when it is becoming rough in an area heavily frequented by wheel chairs, like in front of the pavilion  where many of the weddings are held.

This is soooo typical Port Gamble. Streets are a problem? Fix them. Don't haggle with some agency about whose responsibility it is, just do it. Do it right, of course, and do it when the problem is small, of course, but take care of it. And  so the problems are small because they are taken care of ... early. As a future  user of a wheel chair, I appreciate that attitude.

Sorry you can't move here  quite  yet, my friends, but the rentals are full ... not one house rental available. Is it any wonder that is the case when they take care of the buildings as well as they take care of the streets? And speaking of rentals, the only commercial building available above the waterfront is the Walker/Ames Building, the largest of the business buildings. All other commercial buildings are full. You ought to come by and check out this place ... full WINTER and summer.