While navigating these menacing seasonal road hollows has become a tradition in the same fun category as doing our taxes, there is another phenomenon that goes unnoticed and perhaps does not get its due.
Pothole faces.
A pothole face is the reflexive facial expression that occurs as your chariot splendidly smashes along our thoroughfares. Just as there are an endless variety of potholes so too is our range of masks that reflect the feedback of road conditions.
The typical pothole face is one of grim forbearance as the soundtrack of kathunks and whoomps lurks in the background. There is the one where your eyebrows reach for the top of your head and your lower jaw bounces off your kneecaps as you hit a huge one from out of the blue.
If it wasn't early spring, you'd swear you got hit by lightning and possibly Thor's hammer and he was playing for keeps.
There's the rare combination pothole face like I experienced yesterday. I saw the vehicle ahead of me shake with pain and then an entire family of pothole canyons revealed themselves with terrifying majesty, yawning with a lazy arrogance, entitled to their next sacrificial offering.
It was one of those moments in life where you see your bank account flash before your eyes. It's gonna hurt and there's no way out. With primal instinct I steered a course correction of desperate hope and hung on. What happened? Nothing. Sailed right though them. Pure cream. A genuine pothole miracle. Terror then a giddy relief. I donated plasma shortly after that because clearly with some sort of cosmic billing department, I owed.
Which brings us to a playing-with-fire type of pothole face. There you are, riding along as an innocent passenger and your significant other hits a big pothole. Despite knowing better, you turn your head and shoot the accusatory look of, "Did you even try to miss that one?" Don't. Just don't.
It is pothole season indeed, but where I live, it's the playoffs and everyday is Game 7 out there. Game on!
Douglas Miller
Greater Sudbury