Apparently they’re going to have to close the viaduct for an extended period of time next year, in order to replace its southern approach.
Once they do that, absolute chaos will ensue. For about three or four weeks tops, that is, until people figure out how to get along well enough without it. Then things will settle back down to the normal Seattle congestion levels.
As soon as that happens, the viaduct’s fate is sealed. The only real arguing will be over what to do with the shiny new white elephant of an approach the state just wasted taxpayer dollars building.
About 10 days ago, I finally got around to digging up a chicory root to see how well wild chicory root can be turned into a coffee substitute. It was a big plant, already blooming, which meant the root was probably woody. But I believed that shouldn’t matter, as all I’m going to do is steep it in water.
I washed the large taproot thoroughly, then sliced it up and put the pieces on a cooling rack atop my refrigerator. Because of the configuration of the cabinets surrounding my fridge, it’s where the warm, dry exhaust from that appliance goes. I figured it would do a good job of drying the roots, and at no extra cost in electricity. (It did.)
Everything was very dry today, so I took some uniform-size pieces (irregular sizes won’t get done at the same time) and tossed them into a hot-air popcorn popper (which I read was far better than the oven for home coffee roasting, and I figured this was similar).
It took about five minutes for the pieces to get dark brown, after which I stopped. I was a somewhat alarmed by how they smoked a little when I poured them out. No harm done; they were still soft and pliable, nowhere near reduced to charcoal.
After cooling, they were hard and brittle, easy to crush in a mortar and pestle. I prepared about a rounded teaspoon of the crushed root and let it steep in hot water for five to ten minutes. The result was a very dark liquid that looked just like black coffee, and tasted coffeelike, but milder. Quite tasty, in fact.
I figured I’d share this here in case anyone else wants to try it. There’s plenty of matches on the web for “chicory coffee,” but most of them are merely writing about it or trying to sell it. I couldn’t find any that told how to make it from roots I dug myself.
This is hardly a surprise. If you’re going to build something as huge as a major bridge, odds are it’s going to end up dominating the skyline in all directions for a century or more. Competent engineers have always realized this and figured aesthetics into their designs, even if the aesthitic considerations sometimes raise the price.
In the long run, it’s the visual blight of the ugly bridges that people regret, not the extra cost of the beautiful ones. Nobody in Portland remembers the St. John’s Bridge for how first building, then maintaining it strained the county’s budget for decades, or how the Fremont Bridge cost a whopping six times more than its partner, the dollar-engineered (and now nearly universally reviled) Marquam Bridge.
In fact, anyone who would express regret that the latter is not more like the former would almost universally be regarded as nuts.
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