Descriptive Essay On Highway 30

Highway 30, a slow, twisted piece of hand-made, two-lane miracle engineering that finessed its way through the impossible Columbia River Gorge, was being relocated. The contractors building a new four-lane freeway, Interstate 84, took advantage of a half a century of improvements in construction technology and would either drill through mountains, go around them on winding concrete trestles that clung tenaciously to the mountainside or, where a tunnel or a trestle wasn't possible, they simply removed the whole mountain. The thousands of pieces of construction machinery necessary for this job would often clog what was left of Highway 30. Hundreds of miles of the crowded two-lane, four-hundred sixty-four mile long, main east/west artery that crossed Oregon had been reduced to dusty gravel tracks. Auto air conditioning was a luxury known to few and for most the only relief from the heat was provided by rolling the car windows down. The hot

As we drove up to him, the melon man was holding one-quarter of a bright red watermelon in one hand and his other was extended palm-up for payment. My father's face, already red from the heat, turned a deeper shade of crimson while his mouth opened and closed in wordless rage at the flagrant price gouging. A former fourteen-year-old merchant marine cabin boy apprenticed to masters in the art of profanity, he possessed an eloquent four-letter vocabulary that, when provoked, he could wield with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. In 1961, I'd never heard of 'Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.' No one had. My father was only sixteen years removed from an unimaginably stressful life as a child spy who had delivered pastry to the headquarters of the German High Command in Berlin. The unsuspecting melon man was standing in the crosshairs of a verbal flamethrower that could incinerate its victim in four