By Dr. Robert Thorson

Sisyphus, from Greek antiquity, was eternally condemned to roll a boulder up to the top of Mount Olympus, only to have it roll back down again. Although ostensibly about gravity, his plight also symbolizes the futility of work that goes nowhere.

The same can be said for the never-ending job of spreading sand and salt on roads. Every time it snows, sleets or rains near freezing temperatures, our road crews are out in force, sprinkling sand for safety’s sake. Then it disappears. Where does it come from? Where does it go? What does it cost? Is there a better way?

I reflected on this recently while walking along Route 195 near the University of Connecticut, which is high in the hills of eastern Connecticut. It was the morning after New England’s first big snowfall of the winter, a picture-perfect day with a crisp blue sky, and with lots of that white fluffy stuff. Sand had been scattered on the road for traction. Its earth-tone color was familiar, a muted olive, grayish brown.

Then the sand changed color! For 20 yards or so, it was a rich, brownish red, something called “colorado” in Spanish. Geologists pay attention to such details. Barbers notice people’s hair; bartenders their drinks; geologists their sand.

It was when I saw the red sand that I thought of Sisyphus. We, the taxpayers of upland towns on both sides of the Connecticut River, extending from New Hartford to Stafford, are re-enacting his story from antiquity and paying the price to boot.

Twenty thousand years ago, the hard crystalline ledges of upland New England were being scraped and crushed by a great ice sheet that had invaded us from Canada. As the glacier melted northward, highland streams washed the ground-up debris free of mud, leaving behind thick deposits of coarse gray sand in every small valley.

Things were quite different in Connecticut’s central lowland, however, which extends all the way from New Haven to Holyoke. There, the bedrock is softer, being a sedimentary rock called sandstone, whose particles had already been liberated from crystalline highland rocks millions of years earlier, washed downhill in streams, and deposited around the shorelines of tropical rift lakes where dinosaurs once prowled.

Besides being softer, the stones are also redder, a hue painted by the monsoon-like climate of the Jurassic, in which warm drenching rainfalls alternated with deeply drained, oxygen-rich conditions.

When lobes of glacial ice invaded the central valley millions of years later, they crushed these soft red rocks back into sand. Lots and lots of sand. Also, much more of the sand was retained in the deeper, broader lowland of the central Connecticut. So, when I saw “colorado”-colored sand in Storrs, I knew that it had been hauled uphill more than 500 feet and eastward at least 20 miles.

Why would a highway crew in Storrs travel so far to get sand? Why would they not dig it out of the nearest sandbank in the nearest upland stream valley? The answer is that upland sand serves a higher calling.

During Native and colonial times, there was plenty of sand to go around. Only since the advent of hard-surface roads (cement and asphalt) did our appetite for sand increase beyond that needed for glass manufacture and mortar.

When hard-surfaced roads were first used in the early 20th century, each town and state highway maintenance crew had its own supply, one obtained locally from the nearest available sandbank. Soon, however, agencies were forced to buy and stockpile sand from private contractors, a process that continues today.

Upland sand, the olive-brown kind, is becoming harder and harder to get these days, not because it is gone, but because it is increasingly protected by environmental legislation. The local sand that works so well on winter roads often overlies our finest aquifers, those from which community water supplies are pumped.

The local sand, when left in place, also helps buffer our protected freshwater streams from droughts, pollution and encroaching development. Regulations regarding wetlands, aquifers, streams and suburban sprawl are effectively shutting down the supply of sand, which could potentially be used for other purposes.

So down to the central valley we go. Down to the sandy rivers of the ancient Jurassic rift. Down to the windswept deltas of ice age lakes. There we gather red sand, scoop it up with noisy yellow machines, load it in trucks, haul it back uphill and scatter it on highland roads. But snow always melts. Spring rains always fall on saturated, frozen ground, producing runoff. The red sand, hauled up so high, washes right back down again, where it pollutes our wetlands and streams.

At some time in the not-too-distant future, perhaps when our wetlands are plugged up and when the cost of sand becomes too high, we will have no alternative but to conserve our sand, catching and reusing that which remains. To forestall that day when we have no sand, we must look to state politicians for help. They have already showed us the path toward conservation of energy, water, wildlife, material resources, farmland and cultural resources. Why not with sand as well?

Sisyphus rolled his boulder up, then watched it roll back down again.

We haul our sand up, then watch it disappear downhill.