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“Your placeholder title is ‘There Are Potholes Out Here Bigger than My Dick’?” I ask.
“Well, it’s not my dick,” Bristal says. “It’s Cousin Larry’s.”
“I always heard he was packing,” Mom says. “Why do you think we called him Scary Larry?”
“You’re not helping.” I turn toward Mom, inwardly seething. Some of my irritation must be on the outside, too, because Dad raises both hands in a placating gesture.
“All right, so it’s up,” he says. “Why don’t we all go into the living room and listen to it together? That way there aren’t any surprises when our phones start to ring.”
“Upstairs or downstairs living room?” Mom asks.
“I vote downstairs,” Bristal says. “Also, I want the bedroom with the silver tea set when I move in here after getting kicked out of my house.”
“Deal,” Mom says, and bumps fists with Bristal while draining the last of her wine.
Twenty-Two
Excerpt from podcast episode “There Are Potholes Out Here Bigger than My Dick” of On the Ground in Flyover Country
Welcome back to On the Ground in Flyover Country. This is Bristal Jamison, and I’m hosting this week’s episode as I take you on a virtual tour of all the best—and worst—that Markham County highways have to offer. Also covered—my cousin Larry’s anatomy, which is often used in comparison to whether something is as big as, or smaller than, his special appendage. We’re also going to talk about dead stuff, how far the intestines of a possum can stretch (hint: longer than Larry’s dick). Stay tuned to the end for some special gardening tips on how to grow a pickle that is larger than Larry’s.
And by the way—we’ve turned off comments for this episode, because you all had to go and be dicks last week. If you’ve got something to say to me about this episode, or really anything at all, pony up and say it to my face. I’m on probation, so I can’t hit you . . . technically.
There are 380 miles of county roads here in Markham County and 337 miles of township roads. And if you bother to check in with the Markham County Block Watch Facebook page—and you really should; it’s a great place to post your lost pet or pictures of suspicious people you caught on your driveway cam. Once they’ve been identified, you can get into a fight with their family members. It’s the go-to place on a slow weeknight, if you don’t count PornHub.
But seriously, if you take a glance at the Block Watch page, you’ll see that every resident of those 717 miles of roads thinks that their section of road is the worst. And approximately 680 of those miles can put up a pretty good case for being the ugliest patch of asphalt around.
Take County Road 50 as an example. Running east west and stretching seventeen miles, it’s the most traveled road in the county. Often called the Drunk’s Highway due to five different bars being located along the way, it’s also the hot spot for local law enforcement.
“They hide in the turnarounds by the railroad tracks. Pay attention to the crop rotation, too. Corn’s high enough to hide a cruiser by mid-July, and the weekend of the Fourth is like payday for the po-po.”
That’s my cousin Larry. You’ll be hearing from him on and off during this episode. So—trigger warning for Cousin Larry. It’s an all-encompassing heads-up.
“You see how most of the potholes are on the south side of the road? People think that’s because most of the population lives in the western part of the county, and the drunks are coming home driving too fast. But that’s not it. This here whole thing used to be one lane, all cobblestone, and when they widened it to two lanes, they didn’t bother tearing up the original, just used that cobblestone as a base.
“They probably don’t teach you this in school these days, but the earth is always moving, settling, freezing and refreezing. All kinds of stuff goes on down there—it’s kinda like your mom’s pants, if you know what I’m saying. Anyways, the south side of the road gets all tore up because the base is those original cobblestones, so you’ve got thousands of little shifting, moving parts. But the north side of the road, it’s got a laid base—also kinda like your mom. Anyway, that’s how come 50 is the way it is.”
And there you have it, folks, that should cover the required historical aspects of this episode. Can I graduate now?
“But there are plenty of drunks, don’t get me wrong on that. I live out on 50, you know, and one time this fella ran out of gas right at the end of my driveway. Needed to fill up his can to get on home. I didn’t have any on me so I offered to drive him back, and on the way he tells me this whole story about how his cat just died. Something about how he lost the remote to the TV and went to look under the couch, but he couldn’t see under it on account of it being so dark, so he just flipped the sofa right on over, and it landed the cat. He was in a bad way about that cat. I really felt for the guy.”
Cats don’t only die in living rooms in Markham County. The Markham County ODOT crew sets aside the first week of each month to do roadkill cleanup.
“It takes about three days to cover the entire county. Me and Mike Walton take the dump truck and some shovels. If there’s a deer or something bigger like that, it’s a road hazard and we’ve gotta clear it right away. Sometimes the dump truck is full of gravel or something, so we just take a truck with the lift gate. Once, the county’s truck had a flat tire and we had to use Mike’s, and his wife got a little salty about it.
“With a deer or like a bigger coyote the shovels won’t cut it so we just both gotta grab a pair of legs—one guy on the front and one guy in the back—you just kinda get ’em swinging and give it a toss into the truck. Sometimes the legs have been knocked clean off and that gets tricky. You gotta stand there with your shovels and make some decisions. We always take a chain saw along, just in case.”
Larry says roadkill is just another part of the job, and that you get used to it.
“I mean, yeah, sometimes you see things that set you back a bit. Like raccoons, the male raccoons are just kind of boy whores, but a female raccoon mates for life. So a lot of the time you’ll see more than one dead raccoon, on account of the female won’t leave her man, and she gets hit, too. You see it with the babies a lot, any kind of animal. The mom gets hit, and the kids don’t know what to do, so they just hang around and get clipped. One time I scraped a whole possum family up off Township 20. That mom had a gut on her, intestines longer than my dick.”
Some useful tips from Larry on how to cut down on that roadkill:
“There’s never just one deer. Ever. You see a deer crossing the road, you stop, because there’s another one coming.
“Don’t ever feel bad about hitting a bunny. There’s plenty of ’em.
“Buzzards take some time for liftoff. They are some big, lazy bastards. Don’t think they’ll just get out of the way in time. I’ve seen plenty of windshields blown out. Feathers and blood all over the place.
