Director's Notes – Episode 115

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Since you're obviously a fan of Welcome to Night Vale, I'm pretty sure you'd like to hear about gravel.

I live in a rural area of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. Our address is technically on a main road, but our house is settled about a quarter mile off it at the end of a long gravel drive. We own this road, per our deed, which sounds cool. I literally own a road. 

But if you know anything about geography, you'll know it snows a lot in upstate New York. (If you're reading this in 2023, just kidding, it's a waterless desert hellscape up here.) And if you know anything about geology, you'll know that gravel roads are shit. 

Repeated vehicle use pounds the gravel into mud and dust, and then it rains or snows, and all that water breaks up the road and creates giant potholes. 

A couple times a year, I buy about 9 tons of gravel, which may sound like a lot, but it's not. A 9-ton mound of gravel is about 4 feet high, a flinty pyramid made of mountain innards. And then about 5 or 6 times a year, I borrow my neighbor's loader, which is a tractor that has a giant shovel-y thing up front. I scoop up a bunch of gravel (cryptically referred to as "item number 4") and drive it up the road and pour it onto the potholes and then use the flat end of the shovel-y thing on the loader to flatten it down. Then I repeat this process for all of the potholes along our 2,200-foot-long driveway.

Three days after I do this it rains or snows, and we have potholes again. My other neighbors' goats watch me do this and make noises that sound like laughter, or maybe they're just shouting "Hey! Hey! Heeeey!"

I mention all of this as a point of reference to Michelle Nguyen's comment about using gravel as currency (also Mayor Cardinal's concern over city infrastructure). It's seriously on my mind a lot as I travel, bc I know when I get back home later this week, our private road will look like partially-eaten beef jerky, and the goats will think it hilarious.

- Jeffrey Cranor
October 1, 2017