leave well enough alone?” Wayne had asked me while planting a row of Marigolds. “This is all just preparation for the future. They’ll come in here and bury the lines, then we’ll get re-zoned, then some developer will buy us all out, and they’ll come in here and tear down our houses and put up a goddamned strip mall!”

“I know it, I know it,” I began, in a somewhat patronizing tone, trying to simultaneously agree with and calm down my uptight neighbor. “But I think that’s a long way off, Wayne. For now we should just see how this goes.”

It was only a matter of weeks before the crews showed up. They began work on the other side of the U first, slowly working their way house by house to my side of the subdivision.

We all kept track of their progress with watchful eye throughout the summer as they steadily worked their way, home after home, up the road toward Wayne’s place. By the time they reached his driveway, Wayne was pretty much worked up into a tither.

He was standing on his front lawn, shovel in hand (from where he had been shoveling his compost pile in the back) and staring down the construction crew that drove up with their army of yellow back-hoes and bulldozers. I half expected him to take some naturalist stand and cast himself upon his driveway, declaring that they’d have to dig through him if they wanted to bury lines in front of his house. But, to my surprise, he just put down the shovel and retreated indoors.

The process itself was pretty brutal. The pavement at the edge of the road was busted up and destroyed. They then dug a trench to bury the main lines. And then they did that sloppy mismatched patch job on the asphalt like you see done over potholes in the city. But the worst of it was the connecting of the individual house to the main line. A trench needed to be dug from the road all the way up to the front of your home. This pretty much sliced Wayne’s beautifully landscaped lawn in half. And then the constant foot traffic of the workers stomping about turned his once lush, green turf into a dirty, muddy, orange clay pit.

“All was necessary in the name of progress,” the letter from the city had read. Sure, I thought to myself.

But when the construction crew finally reached my home, my opinion of the whole matter changed a bit. Being a school teacher, I was off for the summer, so I had the pleasure of being home all day during their work. The constant grinding machine noises and shouts of gravely-voiced workers back and forth to one another became a steady nuisance. I tried to occupy myself with television, music, reading with headphones, or anything else I could think of to drown out the racket outside my door. But that proved impossible.

Eventually, I figured if you can’t beat them, join them. So I set up a lawn chair on my front porch and just took to supervise the process. At first I was mildly intrigued by the machinery and techniques employed. But not far thereafter, my fascination was kept by the men employing these techniques.

A half-dozen tall, strong, burly workers bustled about my front yard like a posse of outlaw cowboys. They all wore their thick, brown, lined pants, with snug, sweaty white t-shirts. And of