16 January 2006
Rome
Finally, we can make An Entrance. All right, it's not a very grand entrance. But at least we no longer approach our country house gingerly balanced on two high narrow platforms of packed mud, dextrously avoiding the sump-removing abyss of jagged terrain below and between. And at last our unwary visitors stand a reasonable chance of arriving at our front door with the undercarriage of their vehicles intact.
Our lane had become, simultaneously, a tragic epic (for those unfortunates who failed to notice the trap) and a running joke. We started badgering Giuseppe the bulldozer boy last spring, round about the time when the builders were packing up their tools and heading off. At first, we weren't very insistent. We had other things on our minds, such as trying to get the builders to remove not just their essential tools but also the piles of materials stacked willy-nilly all over what they seemed to view as a useful dumping ground for anything that might come in handy for future projects, ie my garden. The piles extended, naturally, to the bits where the lane and carparks should have been and so would have made grading and gravelling rather arduous tasks. Then there was the fact that at that point, the lane wasn't quite so rutted. Admittedly, it wasn't gloriously smooth, but it certainly wasn't in the peak-and-chasm state it would achieve during our long, drench-then-bake summer – the worst kind of all for putting paid to largely unmade road surfaces.
The situation deteriorated rapidly. By mid-July, we had taken to not giving guests full instructions on how to reach the house; we would talk them through it as far as the village, then have them ring. That way we were forewarned: we could wait for them up the track, ready to explain the finer points of getting down it unscathed.
By the time our end-of-August house-warming party approached, visions of dozens of marooned, oil-leaking cars jettisoned along our lane were making us desperate. But for all our frantic badgering, Giuseppe always had a reason not to come. I know it wasn't slacking: I know few people who enjoy their work, and enjoy working, as much as he does. And I suspect it wasn't procrastination. There may have been an element of having allowed such huge amounts of work to back up during the rain that we were put on his "can wait" list and constantly downgraded, but I don't think that counted for much. No, I think, rather, than we were the victims of a maniacal obsession with the right conditions for making roads.
As I phoned – to order, beg, sob, shout, plead, cajole and upbraid, depending on my mood – I had the philosophy of grading explained again and again. Too wet, and he couldn't work the ground; the bulldozer would plough the base into elaborate mud castles; nothing would come out smooth; the gravel would get sucked into the mire; the next rainfall would sweep everything away down deep channels in the choppy surface. A disaster. And if it were too dry? Oh, even worse. The bulldozer would disappear in a cloud of dust; the dusty soil would drift away, leaving a bumpy base of exposed pebbles; the dry hardcore base would be torn up from the earth beneath; the earthy gravel wouldn't bind with the base; with the first rainfall, everything would come adrift and be washed away and we'd be way back on the wrong side of square one. A disaster too. So when, I asked Giuseppe in exasperation, could it be done? Well, the thing should have been obvious, no? You need some nice drenching rain; then the rain has to stop; the ground has to dry out for a few days... just enough to stay very slightly damp but not enough to shrivel up completely; and then you need two or three more rain-free days in which to do the work, and three or four more during which you drive back and forth over your new-made road as often as possible, making sure that your tyres pass over a different strip each time. And then it needs to start raining again, gently but steadily for a couple of days so that the whole thing blends together nicely. And then it needs to dry out for several days in nice hot sunshine, after which your road surface will be like concrete. Semplice, no? And how often does this perfect combination happen?
Never, you might think. We certainly thought so. Our party came and went: one guest did serious damage to her undercarriage (nobly, she remains a dear friend). My sister rammed our car at some speed against the baked ground (only much later did I find out that the odd new clanking noise from the nether regions was being made by the great metal bar that the engine sits on, which I think came unsoldered at one end in that incident). Had I clapped eyes on Giuseppe, he would have been dead meat. I even went so far as contemplating going elsewhere. But I didn't. What probably stopped me was the stretch further up our access road that Mario had "fixed" in the early summer, putting down new gravel which by the end of August had all but disappeared. He had not, obviously, waited for the perfect moment; he had not adhered to Giuseppe's road-making rules; his bit of road (which he had made me share in the costs of repairing) was an unmitigated disaster. So maybe, I thought, Giuseppe was justified.
We shall now find out. The wet and the dry came in just the right succession last week. We have graded and gravelled and driven back and forth. The sun has continued to shine – coldly but dazzlingly – and all we need now is a bit of rain (forecast for later in the week) to pack the whole thing down. At least, we hope it packs the whole thing down. Will Bulldozer Boy and his Philosophy of Road Making be proved well-founded?
One of his contentions – that a well-made road drains itself – may never be put properly to the test. For Mario, who has never owned nor driven so much as a buzzy Piaggio Ape, no road is complete without a series of rather deep drainage channels hacked across it at regular intervals. He has never experienced that crunching of suspension felt through clutch and brake, has never wondered anxiously whether the load of shopping in the boot is heavy enough to grind the undercarriage disastrously against the bumps. Giuseppe refused point blank to sully his smooth creation with channels, even up the top where it runs through Mario's territory. Who knows for how long after we had left yesterday evening Mario resisted the temptation to get out there with his pick and shovel?