Thought Piece: Oddly Appropriate Signage (2012-03-17)

As is true of many places, where I live we are passing through a rather unseasonable spring, and have been since early February. The city I live in is also the ongoing prey of a boom in pork barrel construction projects on one hand and greed-driven condominium projects on the other. Learning which streets are open and which aren't is a neverending source of surprise here — and I'm not exaggerating either, because even I get surprised, and I commute primarily on foot or by bus. On top of the street closure lottery which is human-generated, we have a wind storm lottery that leads to additional street closures as high speed winds tear fragments off of complete buildings and construction materials off of incomplete ones. (This is not as exciting as you might expect.) With all of this going on, it was probably only a matter of time before signage started showing up in strange places.

Th construction sign in this picture is laying in the middle of a snow and ice covered sand bar on the river near the centre of town. I have to admit when I first noticed it my thoughts an briefly along the usual (I think) lines: more construction debris, gross; or wow, that kegger got seriously out of hand. Except that when push came to shove, the image actually isn't that boring, and not just because you don't often see a bright orange construction sign beyond where any person can conveniently reach it as demonstrated by the fact that it's still there over two weeks later.

So what's a not so boring view of this stranded sign? Well, after a few minutes, it occurred to me that the sign was quite correct in its new circumstances. Rivers are not often thought of as bodies that build things. They only tend to make it into the news if they flood catastrophically (the Mississippi River system), fail to reach the ocean because of excessive water withdrawals (the Rio Grande), or are being subjected to massive dambuilding projects of terrible impact and scale (Three Gorges, China). The fact that most of us depend on rivers for all the water we use is almost invisible, and so is the way rivers remodel and build up their banks and shallower stretches. In the case of the river this sign is in, this section of the river is crossed by three bridges within two to five minutes walk of each other, and they would never have been built there if the area hadn't already been a fording place.

So here we have a river that is busy remodelling a fording place that is at least several centuries old, albeit with some unasked for additions by people. People who couldn't get by without the river, which flows through an otherwise semi-arid region. It gives a different perspective on that construction sign, doesn't it?

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