They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot

Joni Mitchell’s voice is reverberating through the years and rattling in my brain. “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone? They paved paradise and put up a” racetrack! Sorry, Joni, for the revision.

My grandparents, parents, and I came to Norfolk to get away from the concrete and asphalt jungles and to get away from the elongated parking lots known as highways. We came for a more relaxed attitude in a place of pastoral beauty. A place with dirt roads and stone bridges. A place you wanted to walk through, paint and photograph.

A place that is disappearing.

No signs warning the residents. No flyers in mailboxes or on doors. No public comment periods. No chance to say “no, that’s not the Norfolk I moved to.”

Some, most, or all of the last few photographable beautiful dirt roads and stone bridges have disappeared. I didn’t think too much about it when one of the roads I rarely travel became covered with ground up asphalt. Then one of my favorite roads disappeared under a coat of the stuff. 

Recently I was shaken out of bed at 6:30 a.m. by the rumble of one of those really big dump trucks. The whole house shook when several of these monsters thundered past at speeds too fast to stop in an emergency. You know the type – the ones you have to pull as far off the road as you can manage to avoid meeting them by accident. Then came the tractor trailer with road equipment. At first, I didn’t get they were working on the road. I just thought they would be going to the construction project/farm down the road.

Little did I know at the time that they were going to rip out some of the most beautiful, and historic, stone bridges in the county – a true crime in my book. Little did I know they were going to cover one of the most scenic roads left in town with a thick covering of repurposed ground up road surface. You know – asphalt, that stuff responsible for higher temperatures and heat retention in cities, the stuff some of us wanted to get away from? This is the stuff racetracks and parking lots are made of and the stuff that changes water run off, the stuff that needs a crown in the middle of the road to guide water to either side and the stuff people and dogs can’t walk on in the heat of summer.

There is someone who likes to fly on this road. They go so fast you’d think you were at the racetrack. They went by around 6:30 Monday morning, going so fast I couldn’t get to the window in time to see who it was. Doppler effect was left hanging in the air as the sound came in through the windows. 

Racetrack. Not parking lot. And I moved to Norfolk, to Bald Mt for the peace and quiet. The town did not warn the residents. Every dirt road covered is a piece of Norfolk and my heart lost. Those who love Norfolk know what we’ve lost now that it’s gone.

Savage Frieze