Lowell Hayes Artist

An Allegory for a Productive, Over-consuming, Road-loving Society.

1973, our first big “energy crisis.” Lines at the gas stations. Roads choked with traffic. We were saying ‘when gas is $4 a gallon the nation will begin to get serious about alternatives to fossil fuels.’

The Fat Lady rises early and completes all the day’s tasks in time to meet the sunshine on her west-facing roadside porch where she sits and does up her long braids, soaks up solar energy (the phrase is not yet even in the popular lexicon) and watches her beloved road. Fantasies of romance and freedom? She is a woman of the road even if she, herself, seldom travels. Some rare times a 16 wheeler is angled in against the north side of her little house: her man, I guess. The road will soon displace her, consume her place and the little going-obsolete businesses (including the suggestive “Hard and Soft” ice cream dome just down the road) and the bits of open space along here, bulging with multiple lanes and shiny, obese new businesses in the latest post-modern styles.