Something New in Oysterville

     I was in the dining room when I heard it. Pshht!  Pshht!  Pshht!  It sounded like some gigantic snake hissing down the street.  I was almost afraid to look out the window.
     A big truck rolled by squirting lines of  bright yellow paint along the center of the pavement.  “Oh no!”  I thought.  “Not the ugly stripes again!”   Territory Road was just beginning to look like a country road should – well, a paved country road.  In my childhood it was gravel most of the time.  Sometimes it was crushed oyster shell.  I liked that best.  But, since the county now insists that it has to be paved, at least it looks better when the yellow stripes of paint (I think of them as ‘city slickers’) have worn away.
     We asked our County Commissioner once if ‘they’ could just skip Oysterville when stripe renewal time came.  Not possible.  Not allowed.  County roads get county stripes.  And that’s the way it is.
     For the life of me, I can’t figure out how stripes help in our little village.  The road is pretty narrow in the first place.  There isn’t much traffic (as in cars coming from opposite directions at the same time), especially in the winter.  The only times things clot up are when tourists won’t go around a deer or a dog or a couple of visiting villagers for fear of going over the line.  When there are no lines, drivers make much better choices.  Or so I’ve noticed.
     But, we can’t convince the powers-that-be that this is so.  It’s the one-size-fits-all form of regulation.  What I don’t get it why that type of governance applies to stripes on roads but it does not apply to income tax payments.  Why can’t we who live in a tiny historic village have a stripe loophole?  It doesn’t seem fair somehow…