The Eve of Destruction

"On November 12, 2024, the City of Oshkosh Common Council adopted a budget for the 2025 Capital Improvement Program, which included the reconstruction of the streets listed above."

So begins every communication with the city about the project going on in front of us, with the complete text of the resolution attached. Central Street was shaded by a leafy arch of maples, hickory and oak. On Saint Patrick's Day, signs appeared that the street was closed, and they cut down all the trees next to the street. Only our magnolia and the youthful crabapple next door were spared.

The project has been ongoing for months in the three blocks south of ours where Central Street jogs over a bit. Last Friday, they ominously started moving a plethora of massive equipment and supplies onto the boulevard of our block.

 

The first was this giant container, which also held several buckets for the backhoes.

Trench boxes, which are placed in the holes they dig to protect from collapses while people are working in them, come in a variety of sizes.

One twice as wide as the others.

One is twice the length.

Six trench shores, which are 5 by 10-foot, two-inch-thick sheets of steel, moved together in a single pile.

Looks like whatever is under that manhole cover is getting replaced. That's going to take a pretty big hole.

A stack of green pipes.

New hydrants and their connections in front of a pile of black pipes.

Existing manhole covers and grates have already been removed and presumably will be reused.

Lots of machines started showing up. A small loader with a big bucket.

A big digger. The sheer brutality of these things is impressive. They label the inventory numbers on with a welder.

A big loader currently configured as a forklift to move all this stuff around.

An attachment to pound the gravel down after they refilled a hole. It shook the whole house when they were right in front of us.

My favorite of the lot. A plant taking advantage of the dirt accumulating under the arm of one of these beasts. After a week of heavy use, the plant's still there.

Less inviting space underneath the machine.

One of the attachments is a wire brush, which looks like it's used on wet cement.

Surprisingly complex hydraulics needed for it.

So far we've been spared the above-ground hose as the source of all our water that the blocks south of us have had all summer.

The responsible party.

The film is a 220 format roll of very expired Portra 400 NC. Since that format has no backing paper with numbers, I've been writing down how many frames I've used so I don't waste effort taking pictures on the ending leader. When I got to 21, I had plans for the remaining three frames, which I thought I could remember and stopped writing them down. I immediately double-exposed the next frame.

My scheme of advancing one and a quarter rotations of the take-up spool for the first third of the roll, and reducing that to one rotation by the end, worked out pretty well. I got twenty-three frames, but this one was pretty tightly cropped on one side by the end of the roll.

I used the first frame to complete the story of a line of tomato blossoms I've been following because they had to be harvested, so we got to eat them instead of the residents of the garden.

Morton has two hand-drilled .25mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. My curiosity got the better of me, and this is the fourteenth roll developed in a four-month-old Cinestill Liter Powder C41 kit.