There is a pothole on my street that has been there long enough to have a shape. Not a hole — a feature. It has an upstream side and a downstream side. Water enters at one end and leaves at the other, which is more than can be said for most municipal systems.

I have not reported it, because I know what reporting it does. It enters the queue. The queue is real. The queue is also the only part of this process anyone can point to.

Here is what I want to say, and it will sound like a joke, and it is not one. There are people on this street who would fill it themselves. Today. For free. Cold patch is nineteen dollars a bag at the hardware store on Wickenden, and a bag does a hole like mine twice over. The tamping is done with a foot. My neighbor has a foot.

This is illegal, or close enough that nobody wants to find out which. Unauthorized work in the right-of-way. And the city is correct, in the narrow way institutions are correct — you cannot have citizens compacting aggregate into a public street on a Saturday, because when it fails, and it will, the question of who owns the failure has no answer.

The work is cheap. The labor is volunteered. The need is undisputed. The only missing element is permission, which is free, and which will not be given.

Because giving it would mean the city had said out loud that it cannot do the work itself.

That is the whole of municipal government in one hole in the ground.

I will tell you what the column is named after. In number theory there is a region called the critical strip, and everything that matters happens inside it. Not out where things are obviously fine. Not out where things obviously fail. In the narrow band between, where the question is still open, where every zero anyone has ever found sits on one line and nobody can prove they all do.

Roads are the same band. A road is either passable or it is not, and the entire life of a road is spent in the strip between, where it is technically passable and everyone driving it knows the truth.

The cones tell you where the strip is. Not the barricades — barricades mean a decision was made. Cones mean nothing was decided. Cones are the physical form of an open question, and this state has more of them per capita than anywhere I have driven, which I intend as a compliment to our honesty.

A last observation. Everyone here turns left the instant the light goes green, ahead of the oncoming traffic that has the right of way. Elsewhere this is a violation. Here it is a convention — understood by both parties, executed without malice, and it works. The whole intersection depends on everyone agreeing to a rule that is not written anywhere.

We can do that. We do it every day at every light in this city.

The pothole is on the same street it was on in April.