Vic Socotra

28 March 2009

Profit and Loss

The pelting rain made me think of Dwight Eisenhower, which is a bit of a leap, I’ll grant, but capitalism in the microcosm has much in common with the awesome decision that resulted in the commitment to hurl the Allied Forces against Hitler’s Atlantic Wall at D-Day in 1944.

Like Dwight, the Hermanos Brothers Paving Company had all the heavy equipment deployed; rain had forced cancellation of the last and most critical day; Friday dawned with fog and wet but promised a window of opportunity before the rains came again.

The personnel were allocated already, on full alert in their manufactured homes in the distant suburbs, awaiting the early morning cell phone notification. The supplies ordered, the propane tanks full. If they went ahead and could not complete the job it might have to be re-done, wiping out the thin profit margin. A bold supervisor made the call, and by seven the gigantic milling machine was chewing through two decades worth of old cracked asphalt and spewing it up the conveyer belt and out through the tower into waiting industrial-grade dump-trucks.

I wished them the best in their gamble for profit or loss and drove off to a day replete with the myriad frustrations of our version of capitalism played out amid the complexities of the classified world.

I got back from the day of that stuff and stacked the two proposals I have to review and the eight resumes to rank on the desk and took the dog for an inspection tour of the property.

The Hermanos crew had completed the job in fine style, hours ahead of the front, and the Mexicans were all smiling with triumph, profit assured. The painting crew with their most excellent self-powered cart still looked a little anxious, not to mention the motorists who whizzed up to the entrance only to see the crime-scene tape across it at the last moment.

I felt bad. The dog had not received as much attention in the course of the week as I would have liked, and thought I might give him a Friday afternoon adventure.

We went on overland from the fresh asphalt and back on to the crumbling stuff that belongs to the County. The Visiting Dog led the way, startled that he was permitted to take me any place his nose desired. We walked out of the Buckingham neighborhood and into Arlington Forest, past the strip mall and the narrow strip park where the two surly dirty campers had occupied one of the picnic tables, and I briefly wished I had not worn the Rolex so prominently on my bare left arm.

We escaped the hostile gaze and headed down into Lubber Run, and then plunged from the service drive that parallels busy Route 50 into the park that encompasses the flood plain.

The dog was delighted. There were all sorts of decomposing things to delight his nostrils, hundreds of animals who had marked each rock and tree with their distinctive odors.

We wandered the length of the trail up to George Mason Drive, and back up in to the neighborhood of little houses were the old Henderson Mansion once stood- the one that had been the officer's club for Arlington Hall Station, back in the days of hidden secret glory.

We cut through the Culpepper Gardens assisted-living facility, sniffing all the way. We passed tall glass windows of the dining room where the early-bird diners packed the tables, and popped back out onto Pershing Drive.

I was about to order an expeditious crossing of the street to head back to Big Pink when I noticed that the chain link fence that has surrounded the construction site that was once a block of Buckingham garden apartments was gone. The asphalt drive around the building was open to traffic, fresh and new as the new black ice in my own parking lot. A cardboard sign invited us to the leasing office, and I decided to visit.

The Visiting Dog led me down the fresh white concrete walkway to a broad swath of brown dirt that is being transformed into a park. There was more signage, directing us east along the side of the building that faces away from Big Pink

The plan, as I understood it, was for a twin of this gigantic red-brick insula to rise on the other side of the little park, concentrating the density of dwellings from perhaps fifty to five hundred. I have been apprehensive about it, particularly with the prospect that the County has directed that the units be allocated to those in need of assistance in this expensive little jurisdiction.

An SUV was parked by the door, marked with security decals, and we marched up to make our first clandestine inspection of the facility. That will have to happen tomorrow, and it was interesting in its way, since the builder appears intent on making a profit.

In these times, that is much less likely than a loss.

Close Window