It was pretty astonishing to hear the report that Duxbury road crew foreman Adam Magee offered to the town select board at its meeting this week.
Magee said that his fellow road crew members were being heckled, sworn at and generally harassed by drivers while working on Scrabble Hill Road at the north end of Duxbury.
Apparently those doing the heckling are impatient with the town road equipment working in the road, causing some one-way traffic and traffic delays.
Duxbury is a town with almost all steep dirt roads and it is a town that is regularly hard hit when intense rainstorms come through The Valley. Bridges and roads and culverts wash out. That happened this year in April and in May and the town road crews have been working nonstop to fix the damage on Scrabble Hill Road and Camel’s Hump Road.
In addition to trying to repair the storm damage, the road crew is trying to get to its regular summer maintenance work of grading and ditch work as well as trying to maintain River Road, which has become the de facto (but not official) detour for Waterbury Village’s massive road project.
It’s hard to see the logic in heckling or cursing the guys who are fixing your road. It’s hard to understand what might be gained by flipping the bird to the guys who plow your road after blizzards or lay down the sand that’s critical on steep dirt roads in the winter. It’s appalling that Magee would have to come to the board and ask that a sheriff be hired to keep his crew members safe.
Living on steep dirt roads in Vermont requires a certain type of patience. Some days you’ll be behind the grader on a section too steep or curvy to get around it for a while. Some days you’re behind the plow, which is generally a good thing; ditto for the sand truck. Some days you’re behind someone with all-season radials or a logging truck or a tractor or tourists taking pictures.
Patience, you Scrabble Hill Road hecklers! Getting angry at the road crew guys is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
