Beach Tar On My Feet

Here’s a still life for you. The tubs and the jugs are both crack filler, the tubs about three and a third gallons and the jugs just under a gallon. Nine and a third gallons of goo, poured or troweled into driveway cracks, with maybe as much again still needing to find a home. Somebody who’s done this chore before is going, “Just how big is your driveway, and how long did you let it go?”

Twelve hundred square feet. A long time.

I thought when I started this chore that just the three jugs would do it. I went back to the suburban, big-box this morning for more, and I thought that would be enough. Nuh-huh. Some of the seams between drive and outbuildings (garage and shed) are fist width. I’m going back this evening.

The goo in the jugs is asphalt, clay, plastic, and water. It comes out of the jug darker than either, and of a color somewhere between the Chicago River at Michigan Avenue, and the Mississippi at Cape Girardeau. It dries to that nice, shiny tar black. The stuff in the tubs looks like the same formula, and the colors are the same, except that the manufacturer has added sand and it doesn’t get shiny.

The tubbed stuff gets my vote. You have to trowel it, and it doesn’t spread as smoothly, but the sand adds bulk, and I’ve got seams and holes I’d never fill from the jugs.

Will I ever finish this chore? The next trip is my last. I’m not going back. Still, Barbara says this would cost us three grand or better if we got somebody else to do it.