Who Clears Your Road?

Our house is about five miles from the nearest grocery store. The first four and a half miles are along country roads, and on a typical drive we see more wild animals than cars and trucks. Deer, turkey, skunks, possums, squirrels, mink, raccoons, muskrats, rabbits and buzzards are common. Unfortunately, many of these animals are not well trained in traffic avoidance and the bodies strewn along the side of the road demonstrate the abundance of wildlife in the fields and forests. When the animal is large, someone will stop to remove the carcass from the highway. Similar clean up is required when a tree falls onto the road or large rocks slides from a hill side. I’ve seen strangers cooperate to drag a dead deer from the road or debris from the street. I’ve seen large logs cut using personally owned chain saws and the log sections or rocks loaded into trucks and hauled to the dump. When the road is blocked, groups of individuals cooperate to become “a road clearing community” but when a...