Spring/Summer 2006: Land

Parking Strip

By Dan DeWeese

The street is too close. Before cars, horses did their business there, and even now the street means traffic and exhaust, oil slicks and manhole covers, the gutter and its squalid debris. The street is the throughway of the general public and the conveyance of that public's mayhem. No one wants a front door that opens onto asphalt.

Plenty of institutions have sprung up in the gap. Porch and stoop, planter and American lawn: our little public gardens that demand our little public gardening. And with those zones, the picture should be complete: the residence is back from the street, and in front lies the sidewalk from which pedestrians may view the grounds and cast their admiration. But then beyond the sidewalk, unclaimed and often ignored, the solution to no apparent problem--there it is, that one more strip of land. Is it the verge, the berm, the tree belt, the parkway? In Oregon, we favor the parking strip.

But what is one to do with it? Clear it, box it, and cover it in rock? Dig a hole and plant a tree? Set roses amid a sea of bark, lavender to perfume the drive, tulips in a row? The mind reels. Or recoils. There is a code: the emperor of house and lawn shall, as one charter reads, "construct, reconstruct, maintain, and repair" his parking strip. But is one maintaining a soothing Martha's Vineyard getaway, or perpetually repairing an unruly Cuba separated from the yard's clipped American green?

Most of us put our trash there, but what an awful thing to say.

It's rougher country there in the parking strip. Up against the curb, one finds new rules--step across the walk and let your freak flag fly. Botanic rebellions in the lawn proper are often put down quickly with chemical warfare, but in the parking strip dissent is indulged. After all, weeds are culture, too. And if the dandelions really get organized, the mower can still come roaring over that walk at any moment, the tiller can tear its growling way through that crabgrass bohemia and reduce the place to smoking ruins.

Some people claim there's no difference, that the strip is as much a part of things as the sidelawns, as cherished as the sandbox. Ask the groundskeeper, though, and get another story. That no-man's-land is susceptible to the whim of any passing stranger, but if there's an injury, it's on the owner. Some speak of a City Engineer who might come again someday to judge, but no one's seen him lately. Street crews spray their occult orange symbols on it. Teens light fireworks there, and dogs out for their constitutional see it as an opportunity for compromise. And if the animal has used the parking strip, well--here one finds the line some pet owners are willing to cross.

One doesn't necessarily wish it bigger. And if one morning it was gone--departed in the night?--we might look about in confusion for a moment, but it would be a short and happy grief. After parking the car we would step onto the sidewalk, then up the walk and through the yard, our memory of the parking strip fading by the time the front door closed behind us.

Who knew a sidewalk could be so wide?

Published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities