Here in Connecticut for more years than most of us still have functional brain cells, development proponents have yearned to have our Nutmeg State finally finish Route 11 in Eastern Connecticut.
That sort-of-circle shape is an artistic approximation of the part that was always dreamed of but never funded, financed or finished. And now, it never will be. If you've driven in our fair state for more than an hour in any direction, it's a cinch you're probably no more than 25 miles from where you started.
That's been part of our secret appeal, I think. You can never get to anywhere from anywhere else in a direct route. We go North to head South and drive East to Go West and think nothing of it as we've long since confused travails with travel.
We already had plenty of state highways with beginnings, middles, and ends in the correct proportion and number. Making Route 11 whole would have been not just expensive but ludicrously expensive.
As it happened, decades of state-funded surveys and studies were for naught as the Federal Highway Administration had anywhere between 1.2 and 1.5 billion reasons to pull the plug and have now done so.
Perhaps it's for the best in many respects not just in terms of saving far too finite dollars for more deserving projects, but to allow those who will feel cheated of a near birthright in the completion of Route 11 to stare into the fires as the night's shadows grow longer and murmur and mutter about what might have been.
-bill kenny
