Re: Deeper Than a Mud Puddle pt. 4

"How was the ride up?" I ask facetiously. I haven't traveled in a while but have heard stories about the state of things.

She looks at me with a grin and replies, "It was… deeper than a mud puddle."

We have a good laugh. She knows the phrase has a dual meaning here. Local folks sort of morphed its meaning over the years to describe the strong relationships we have developed. Interdependency is a word that comes to mind. But that's not how the phrase was born.

The phrase originated back when maintenance on the state highway systems first began to falter during the RISE program. After the first serious post-Peak economic hiccup, the government developed several new programs. One of them was RISE. RISE stands for Regional Initiatives via Sponsored Enterprise. The idea was that the states knew best how to improve their local economies so the federal government would provide block grants with the understanding that the responsibility for regions within state boundaries now fell squarely at the state level. In reality, it was a way for the government to cut funding to states in order to attend to its own fiscal dysfunction.

Already overburdened state governments ended up funneling the grant money to their higher profile programs and decreased funding for infrastructure in areas that were considered "non-contributors" economically. This mostly meant rural areas and depopulated urban centers. Unless you lived in a place experiencing some measure of economic stability, or near a work camp or military base, you had probably felt the effects of being "razed". This program quickly earned a new title: Regions Isolated by a Stopped Economy.

The transportation work camps began focusing on interstate highways and the corridors connecting Canada and Mexico. Most state highways and virtually all county roads went without. People in rural areas began to classify roads by how deep the resulting potholes, washes, and gullies were. If a route had been labeled "deeper than a mud puddle", you were taking a chance traveling at speed on it. The danger wasn't the average pothole, but the "abyss" that might lie around the next turn. Tweet