Scene on the Road

Lola Fields, like a few other readers, sent in her photos after my final summer road trip column appeared in the newspaper last week. I told her, like the others, that I would resume blogging again soon, and would save her photos for posting in the future.

So here I am, getting ready to post my FIRST non-road trip blog when she sends me a new photo. I find it so amazing that I'm sneaking it in ahead of my own post, as the truly LAST of the summer road trip photos from readers.
But let's go to the beginning - her first email from last week: "I saw the damnedest thing Tuesday morning when crossing 30th Street at Market (Post Office side). They don't get any more 'Scene on the Road' than this."

She described the rat in the narrow pot hole as looking "like dental amalgam," then joked about it being "an elegant solution to two of (Philadelphia's) more notorious problems...axle breaking pot holes and rat infestations." Fields wondered in her email, "if we'd be seeing whole colonies in the larger holes."

Two days later, the rat was still there, so she took another photo with her cell phone. "It has become decidedly convex," she reported.

Which brings us to her latest dispatch from the roads, signed: "Absolutely flummoxed."

"I didn't think I'd have reason to write to you about this again, but a week later I passed the pothole rat again and I'm not sure what to think..."






Yes, the rat is still there. And yes, that's fresh asphalt cold mix patch there as well, applied carefully - and precisely - by hand around the poor creature.