I walked over to the co-op last week while a paving crew was laying new blacktop on the parking lot. Had to walk all the way around to the other side of the lot to get into the store. The whole front of the lot was fenced off with bright orange plastic webbing strung between chest-high construction cones. Every five feet, a sign that read, “No Entry, Under Construction,” was duct-taped to the webbing. One of those huge machines that crawls on caterpillar tracks and lays a perfectly flat spread of molten asphalt in its trail was making its way across the parking lot. Just ahead of it a dump truck not quite as big as the state of Montana was slowly inching along, its bed hoisted into the air so the asphalt would run out the back into the crawling spitting asphalt-laying machine. The air stank of oil or tar or whatever vile hydrocarbon asphalt smells like. Huge, sweaty men stomped back and forth at their jobs, globs of asphalt sticking to their boots.

And just ahead of me a tiny little woman in a sun dress, wearing nothing but sandals on her feet, tried to climb over the webbing to cross the parking lot. Oh ye gods. Luckily, her leg hardly cleared the top of the fence before half a dozen hardhats turned in her direction and shouts of “HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY!” sent her right back over the fence.