It's not glamorous work, but it pays well and offers opportunities for overtime.

After the divorce and the foreclosure, after most of my friends stopped calling, county maintenance was steady enough.

Quiet, predictable, and away from the noise from my life I was trying to avoid. I was assigned a new

job to do. Take the truck, follow the checklist, tear down the old signs, log the trails

as cleared, move on. I was sitting in the diner the morning before the job started, staring

into a mug of burnt coffee,

pretending not to hear the old men at the corner table watching me.

One of them finally spoke up.

Some trails don't want to be forgotten.

The others gave a chuckle at that, half serious, half sarcastic.

Small town men with too many years behind them, too familiar with bad stories, too many bad stories told over whiskey and boredom.

I gave them the polite nod you learn to use when you're too tired to argue.

But they're just signs, I said, just trees.

They didn't argue.

They just kept watching me finish my coffee.

Truth was, this route landed on my lap because nobody else wanted it. Not the younger guys,

not the retirees pulling half shifts to pad their pensions. Even my supervisor didn't look

me in the eye when he gave me the paperwork. A lot of bad breakouts there, he said, be careful

where you step.

I figured it was the usual small town superstition.

Faded trail markers nailed to rotting trees weren't going to bite me.

The bureaucracy doesn't scare me.

...