I want to write about grading – but not the kind of grading that results in scores or letters A-F (excluding, for whatever reason, ‘E’). I have something to say about a kind of grading few people think about anymore – and even fewer understand. If you have lived your life on paved roadways, you may not even have a frame of reference for the kind of grading I have in mind: grading gravel (or dirt) roadways. This is something I have been thinking about for a while, and I have alluded to it in other things I have written, but I want to unpack it in a little more depth here.
When I first moved to the area, the gravel roads in the rural place I then called home were well-maintained. Drivability on those roadways varied depending upon numerous factors of course: weather conditions, traffic volume (especially heavy traffic such as planting and harvest equipment), seasonal freeze/thaw cycles, etc. But the roads were generally resilient and it would take several weeks – or even months – for them to degrade enough to seriously impact drivability. That is normal for gravel/dirt road surfaces. They wear. And they need regular maintenance to remain drivable for passenger cars. So the local governments employ people to perform this maintenance: namely, road grading.
But after a few years, something changed. Where the roads once shed rainwater with minimal impacts, each passing storm began to erode the driving surface noticeably. Where tracks of heavy equipment and agricultural tread from tractor tires used to leave periodic indentations in the road surface that would cause annoying vibrations when driven over – but no real threats to safety – they began creating morasses of ruts snaking through piles of soft gravel. As a result, the roads became noticeably more difficult (and dangerous) to drive. Ruts and soft spots can divert the momentum of a vehicle off to the side – and throw it out of control. It’s dangerous. And these roads had become so bad, so frequently, that I began to simply use different (read: longer) routes. I am not certain what caused this change – but I strongly suspect someone new had taken over the job of grading those roads. It could have been that budget cuts had led the county to do less to maintain those roads. However, while that may have been part of the issue, I don’t think it is what was at the root of the change. The nature of the changes smacked of a loss of expertise in the craft of road maintenance.
I learned to grade (my ¼-mile long, gravel driveway) the same way people always learn any craft: by trial and error… and error… and error… and minor success, and more error… and more successes, and more errors… until I had eventually found enough wrong ways to do it that I developed some competence in doing it well (not “right” per se, because there is really no such thing as the “right” way to craft something). Just like learning to walk by walking necessarily entails falling down, instructive errors are essential to developing competence in any complex domain. And my instructive errors in grading were diverse. For example, I tried grading when it was too dry – but only succeeded in shifting the light, surface layer of sand and dust back and forth, because my Ford 8N was not heavy enough to press the back blade down into the rock-hard, complex, clay-based substrate that was my driveway when it was thoroughly dry. I succeeded in making a lot of noise and was rewarded with a nose full of brown boogers after being engulfed in the resulting dust-cloud. But that is about all. I accomplished nothing in the way of meaningful driveway maintenance. At least that experience didn’t make it worse though. That happened when I tried to grade during the spring thaw, when it was too wet and loose. I got the tractor stuck (more than once) and eventually gave up, deciding to simply leave the gouges and big piles of mud to dry where they were, rather than continue cursing and wasting fuel. The series of spring rains that followed meant I had to drive around those gouges and piles for a couple of weeks. It took most of the rest of that season to redistribute the portions of the driveway I had damaged – and several years to properly repack them. In both of these cases, the driveway was, at the time, in need of grading. Ruts had begun to form and driving on it was like taking a turn on “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.” But the conditions were wrong to actually do the grading that was needed. I learned from those mistake and have not repeated them – at least, I haven’t made such extreme mistakes since then. But those were far from the end of my errors. I’ve graded when it was a little too wet, quite a bit too wet, a little too dry, quite a bit too dry… By about my 6th driveway-grading season, I began to have a “feel” for the driveway. I could tell by the way it looked and felt when I drove on it, when the conditions were about right for grading.
Of course, mistakes related to moister content weren’t the only ones I made learning to grade. I misadjusted the blade in manifold ways: depth, pressure, angle, tilt… I misjudged the amount of time and fuel the job would require. I neglected to account for regular maintenance on my 65-year-old tractor. I ignored weather forecasts – and rainstorms quickly undid my work. I did some of the right things too – but did them the wrong way. For example, I knew roadways were supposed to have a bit of a “crown.” They should be higher in the center than on the edges, so that they shed water toward the sides rather than puddling in the middle. So I adjusted the blade to create a crown. But I overdid it. It was tricky to drive on the driveway like that. If you didn’t stay directly down the center, the vehicle would be on an uncomfortable angle and tend to pull to one side. Worse, the driveway shed water too well. Rainwater ran off so fast it formed little rivulets that eroded the driveway from center outward – especially on the sloped sections of the driveway. On the horizontal sections rainwater ran to the edges and pooled, creating soft spots. Eroded sections and soft spots are dangerous for driving.
So I learned to wait for the moister level of the driveway to be in an acceptable range before attempting to grade the driveway – even if it meant living with ruts for a while. I learned to anticipate how long it would take the driveway to stabilize after grading and plan accordingly for weather forecasts. I learned to adjust the pressure/depth of the blade based on the actual moister level and how much work needed to be accomplished. I learned to spread the surface nearly flat on the sloped sections of the driveway (because gravity doesn’t need any help moving water from those sections) and create just enough crown on the horizontal section – and adjust it for seasonal conditions. And, at the same time, I learned to anticipate how the tractor would perform – and came to know what it sounds, feels, and even smells like when the job is getting done well.
What I am driving at is this: in order to learn to grade my driveway, I had to make lots of mistakes. More importantly, I had to pay close enough attention to learn from those mistakes. I needed to evaluate the outcomes of each attempt and make reasoned changes in light of them. Thomas Edison supposedly said he had not failed 1000 times, he had found 1000 ways not to make a lightbulb. I hadn’t found nearly that many ways not to improve the drivability of a driveway by the time I moved on from a place where that was a relevant skill. I could do it pretty well by that point (though I still misjudged how long the job would take and often ended up having to either rush the job or leave it partially finished when I lost daylight – but that was more a function of having too many other things competing for my time). I was probably at the stage Dreyfus and Dreyfus describe as “competent” – or maybe even “proficient.” I still had to consciously plan when and how to approach grading – taking into account all of the things that bear on the task. More (deliberate) practice probably would have continued to improve my intuition and automaticity for the task. But my driveway was usually in pretty good shape – and I took pride in that. And that sense of pride came not from having done something unique or having done it better than anyone else. Millions of people have become proficient at grading – and most of them were certainly more proficient than me. My sense of pride came from a sense of having met criteria internal to the task itself. The job had been done well. And I could point to the concrete results – or, better yet, drive confidently down them each day.
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Coda: back to the county roads. About a year after the shift from well- to poorly-maintained roads, I decided to take a chance and use one of the main, unpaved, county roads one day. The weather had been good for a while and it was the middle of the agricultural season, so I thought there probably had not been much damage from heavy equipment. And it was a faster (and more pleasant) route when the road was in good shape. By chance though, this was a day the road was being graded. Driving was difficult as I had to navigate a large burm of gravel, dirt, and grass that had been piled toward the middle of the road. That was expected, since the pile needed to be created first, before it could be spread out into a more even driving surface. But what made the driving particularly challenging was that the placement of the burm was very erratic: zig-zagging all over the area in the center of the road. And beside it, the roadbed had been gouged in some places, was completely untouched in others, and had random debris strewn all over. After a few miles, I passed the 6-wheeled, Caterpillar road-grader that was busy building the burm. I could see the driver in the cab; not clearly enough to see his face, but clearly enough to see he was young-ish. That didn’t necessarily confirm my suspicion that he was new to the job, but it was pretty strong evidence. In rural counties like the one in which I lived, these were the kinds of jobs that people keep for a LONG time. While he was old enough that he could have been doing the job for several years, it is more likely this particular driver had taken over for a grizzled old veteran when he finally retired after decades of service. The man in the Cat. probably was new, and the wisdom of the previous practitioner of roadway maintenance had probably been lost in the transition. But I could also see that wisdom was not likely to be recovered by this particular driver.
How can I possibly know the operator of the equipment wasn’t likely to improve? As I drove past, I could see he was talking on a cellphone. Road grading requires constant attention. Even in equipment designed to follow contours of road surfaces as they undulate up and down and pitch side to side, they still depend on input from the operator to adjust for the nuances of the road and conditions. Those were the things I needed all those instructive errors to teach me – but they only teach someone who is paying attention. The machine this guy was operating was so heavy, and so powerful, it was immune to the kinds of fluctuations in moister-levels that would incapacitate my little tractor – and consequently, it had infinitely more destructive potential. This guy was not paying attention. He didn’t know what mistakes he was making – and was blithely unaware of the damage he was causing to the road. How could he possibly get any better at his craft when he was clearly treating it merely as a task?
So as I accelerated away from his machinery (I could safely drive quite a bit faster once I got to the portion of the road he had not yet wounded), and thought about the gouges in the road and random debris trailing off behind him, I realized this would not be a viable route until someone new was hired to do the job. That didn’t seem like it was likely to take long though. It usually doesn’t take long for people as disinterested in doing quality work as this guy to screw something up badly enough to get fired. Hopefully it won’t be the kind of mistake that results in someone getting hurt…