Some wag has put up a sign on the highway near Snipe Lake, some seven miles west of Eston, Sask. It reads: Caution, road ends here. Drive at own risk.
The sign is apt and drivers do well to heed it, for driving on to Eston one finds oneself negotiating an obstacle course which may well become known as “pothole alley.” I took pictures of one large, obviously fresh, pothole which took up much of the right hand lane.
Resorting to my handy primer of prairiespeak, a book with the unlikely title Cold as a Bay Street Banker’s Heart, I found that a pothole may be a natural depression in the ground which collects runoff water and it may also be “the hole left in the road by a frost boil.”
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A frost boil, in turn, “is a graphic description of the eruption in a road, during spring thaw, that results in a crater or hole in a road.”
“During repeated freezing-thawing cycles in spring, moisture gets trapped in numerous cracks and crevices in the road and between the road bed and paved surface. The tremendous force of alternately freezing and thawing water buckles the pavement, pushing it out like a boil coming to a head. … The most heavily paved and reinforced roads can be torn apart in a few days of spring weather.”
Obviously, potholes are not just a local problem. Winnipeg has been called “pothole capital of the world” a title that many cities and towns across the country also claim for their own.
The Dictionary of Canadianisms does not give an origin for the term “pothole,” referring to a natural depression in the ground, but it does show that the term was in use as long ago as 1880.
Earlier, these depressions were known as “kettles.”
Whatever you call them, potholes aren’t pretty and they can be downright dangerous if you hit them the wrong way. Nobody likes them much.
Some cities, and the Saskatchewan Liberals, have from time to time put into place “pothole hotlines,” something like a Crime Stoppers line, in which members of the public are asked to report the latest infraction, in this case where the latest hole in the road is to be found.
Like most other things in life, with the possible exceptions of mosquitoes and gnats, potholes do have a few redeeming features, however. They make for good coffee-row conversation and provide jobs for highways personnel and those who do front-end alignments.
