Evans’ Rag

Vol 6 Issue 8

Momentarily, a pause in the leaf blowing cycle has left my eardrums humming by their lonesome.

Now if the County could vacuum the chest-high leaf piles crowding the street, Layla would go back to sniffing mailboxes and tree trunks instead of plunging into the leaves like brown crunchy snow piles.

Layla, like most dogs, makes due with what she’s given.

A older neighbor down the street nearly ran us down the other morning swerving around the leaf piles like he was on his way to a fire. He used to set his car up on wheel ramps crowding the street to work on it, leaving it that way for weeks at a time, but he’s gotten too old for car repairs. My nickname for him is the postal worker on account of his unfocused stare somewhere past your face – and his carport so full of junk you can reach the roof without effort. I just knew someday he’s going off on someone, and I’m hoping it’s not me. Came close the other day.

We have an ongoing argument in the neighborhood over getting the leaf piles removed in a timely fashion. I once suggested we haul them all to the government center and hold a marshmallow roast in the parking lot. But the County folk like waiting until after several good rain soakings so they can only collect half the piles, the other half being a soggy mess no vacuuming can get rid of.

When I first moved to Virginia, Fairfax County was more rural than not, with no sidewalks and erratically paved streets. Now it’s approaching 2-million people and we have the traffic to prove it.

A friend said when he was growing up here, Tysons Corner had a solitary gas station sitting atop the hill. Now it’s become Mordor with as many ugly high rises as you could think to build, and Route 7 is twelve lanes of choking traffic bisected by the gargantuan concrete pylons and the overhead Metro line heading to Dulles. Urban living at its finest.

Our congressman claimed Tysons Corner was the County’s new downtown. He honestly believed that – but he’s a Democrat with too much optimism.

A majority of the streets in Fairfax County still have no sidewalks – evidently we retain that proud rural history even to this day. Bailey’s Crossroads is a highway interchange with no sidewalks where Route 7 crosses Route 50, and Seven Corners has at least that number of nonfunctioning intersections with nary a sidewalk to mess with the look.

A few years ago the County made a big hullabaloo about ‘reimagining’ Seven Corners. Turned out, what they meant was reworking the traffic patterns by cutting off some streets and building more flyovers – probably so it will look more like a baby Tysons Corner.

My firm belief is that the County’s urban planners all studied LA for best planning practices.

Route 50 and Route 7 have cow paths from all the immigrant workers trudging to and from the bus stops – you can tell the immigrants by the fact they don’t drive oversized SUVs – old Honda Civics with sprung suspensions, and the occasional bicycle weaving through traffic with groceries in one hand. They can’t be real Americans until they have five cars for every household, otherwise how would the family get to the Tysons Mall?

Another postal worker lives at the opposite end of our street – actually he’s a retired English professor who likes collecting old cars like memorabilia. He has one under a brown tarp that couldn’t move if you dragged it out with chains. I don’t think it has complete tires anymore. Another junker sits proudly in front of it, papers stacked past the windows, like it’s used for extra storage. Haven’t seen that one move either. And yet a third, with expired plates.

Fairfax County has an ordinance against keeping junkers outside of junkyards—Fairfax has lots of ordinances, but no one enforces them. Like the tree ordinance making it illegal to cut them down without replacing them ten for one. Of course if we got rid of the trees, there’s be fewer leaves to collect…

Ah, there, the leaf blower’s are back. We all can resume our bucolic lives, along with the deer who’ve been chased out of the parks by bow hunters the County planners thought to invite in to cull the herd – would I lie to you?