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From a distance, it looked like just another innocent water puddle.
Even as I drove closer, there was no sign of the havoc that loomed ahead. I wouldn’t know what hit me, or rather what I hit, until it was too late.
Instead, I bantered with my passenger about something I no longer remember.
The first thud snapped us both out of our banal conversation, and a closer look through the windshield told the rest of the story.
Lurking underneath that deceptive, watery surface, a concrete crater sat poised to snag my unsuspecting tires.
With another thud and shrieks from my passenger and me, there was no denying the inconvenient truth that lay below.
A battle had just begun.
It was me against the potholes.
Great, I thought. With this spring’s construction season bearing upon us, who needs this adding to the mayhem?
After all, the relative lack of traffic and road worries is one of the attractive things about living in a low-population area.
The pothole experience ignited an unpleasant flashback to the days when I lived in Michigan, a state where streets look like Swiss cheese and wheel alignments are required more often than one wants.
Compared with Michigan’s roads, Sioux Falls’ streets must be what heaven looks like.
I confess, though, that I had suspected a few months ago that this year’s pothole season would be worse than any I’ve experienced in Sioux Falls since moving here five years ago.
Midwinter’s deep freeze was tantamount to sending warning shots to local drivers that even when the cold finally released its stranglehold on the area, it would leave its own Kilroy-was-here mark on the pavement.
This spring’s battle was foretold in February.
Add to that the looming pain of detours around parts of 26th and 57th streets for necessary but irritating improvements and I can begin to feel my forehead throbbing already.
That’s because the math is simple.
Nearly 3,000 new residents a year. More people. More cars. Negligible uses of mass transportation. Everyone’s driving.
In Michigan, officials constantly reminded the complainers that the pothole problems and perpetual need for major road improvements were side effects of having legions of people living there and driving on the roads.
Though this prairie city never will be Detroit or Grand Rapids, it was inevitable that the beginnings of road wars would find their way to Sioux Falls. It’s part of the price of admission into the world of growth.
All of that is hard to take, of course, when you’re fending off auto repairs on one hand and detours on the other.
But it does make you wonder what Sioux Fallsians are supposed to do. Send the people to Iowa?
Now when I enter the parking lot that hurled me out of Utopia, I drive the speed I was supposed to drive in the first place.
I skirt around a couple of orange cones that now gracefully mark the pothole’s spot.
And I’m thinking maybe these increasing road pains are ironic signs of something good.
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