Keep Your Cool on the Road

Road construction crews are not our enemy.

Granted, they slow us down, order us around like a toddler's mama, and some of us think they're way too lackadaisical from our air-conditioned perches. None of that, though, justifies what happens when our rage hits the road.

Too many motorists regard reduced speed limits as somebody else's problem, which is turning out to be a problem for everyone.

For instance, Indiana, saw 636 injuries and 14 deaths in work zones last year.

We topped those figures in Ohio, with 19 deaths and 2,101 injuries. And we call ourselves the Heartland.

California's construction road rage has gotten so out of control that the state shut down Highway 138, which is called "Blood Alley" because of all the injuries and deaths in its work zones. The $44-million-widening project tried to allow rush hour traffic, but then things got out of hand.

The Associated Press reported that someone threatened to climb a water tower and shoot workers. Another angry driver hurled a burrito at a construction worker. Vandals tore down barricades and stole construction equipment. One driver was arrested and charged with assaulting a flagman. Another worker was shot in the leg with a BB pellet.

In the five years leading up to the start of construction, there were nearly 3,000 traffic accidents and 68 deaths.

The California story is making the rounds in newspapers and on blogs, where one anonymous writer blasted road crew workers for "standing around" and "leaning on shovels."

It's a common criticism, typically voiced by those whose idea of manual labor is to strap a bottle of weed killer to their hips and ready-aim-squirt. If more of us spent even a half-hour in the hot sun bending over and digging out those weeds, we'd get some notion of what it means to work for a living.

Manual labor is not something the human body can perform without a break or breather for even one hour, let alone eight. There's a reason an hour workout in the gym is considered a day's worth of exercise.

The body can only take so much.

In his fascinating book titled "Steel Drivin' Man," historian Scott Reynolds Nelson illustrates how work songs such as the "Ballad of John Henry," about the legendary worker who helped lay the first railroad lines through the Appalachian Mountains, were not romantic celebrations of manual labor but rather cautionary tales meant to remind track liners to slow down.

"Many hammer songs referred to John Henry, dwelling on his hard work, suffering, and death, not his victory over the steam drill," he wrote, offering this example:

"The hammah that John Henry swung

"It weighed over nine poun',

"He broke a rib in his left hand side,

"And his intrels fell on the groun'."

The men hammered to the rhythm of the song, but it did more than set a pace, Nelson wrote. "(H)ere was a song that told you what happened to men who worked too fast: They died ugly deaths; their entrails fell on the ground. You sang the song slowly, you worked slowly, you guarded your life, or you died."

Writer Michael Mraz discovered the singular truth about manual labor (it's hard — real hard) for Men's Vogue magazine. He visited a sports camp in central Ohio that uses manual chores such as chopping trees, pulling tractors and busting concrete to build muscles.

For one exercise, the training coach handed Mraz a pair of workers gloves and a sledgehammer and told him to aim for three circles on a tractor tire for six one-minute rounds.

"You're working on the railroad now," he told Mraz. "Take pride in it."

At the end of six minutes, this is what was left of Mraz: "I can barely keep my hands around the handle, my pace has decreased by a third if not more, and I'm missing each circle by 6 inches. When (the trainer) calls time, I drop the hammer and nearly collapse."

Now, imagine doing that kind of work in the heat of summer with one eye always on the lookout for a speeding car.

Surely, we drivers can keep our cool.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… And His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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