Indy.com reporter Konrad Marshall waits to pat the pot hole filler down with a shovel after Steve Robbins 53 fills the hole. (Michelle Pemberton / Indy.com)

Reporter Konrad Marshall takes a breather with the main tool of his morning trade - a DPW shovel. (Michelle Pemberton / Indy.com)

As long as a routine car trip around town can become an expensive hassle within seconds, road crews like the one that recently included Marshall are a welcome sight to motorists. (Michelle Pemberton / Indy.com)

Click there to see a video of Konrad's pothole adventure in action

On the way to my assignment last week -- a morning shift with a crew from the Department of Public Works -- I hit a pothole. A big one.

Ordinarily, I'd consider that bump in the road serendipitous, or at least apt, given my job for the morning: repairing the gaping wounds in our streets. But this year in particular (at this particular time of year), hitting a pothole is downright inevitable.

They are legion, these lesions -- a virus spreading over and through the darkened arteries of this city, which is an organism in its own way.

My day began at 7 a.m. at a city garage on Martin Luther King Jr. Street. I had barely woken up, as had most of the city, but I joined a crew, put on my gloves and reflective safety vest, and we made our way to the morning worksite, a street near 86th Street and Township Line Road.

On the way there, the roads became slowly more trafficked, cars, trucks and SUVs thundering down the asphalt, bouncing over rises, tugging at the surface of the street as they angrily rounded corners, tires gradually carving at the bloodline of our metropolis.

Once in place, on Brewster Street, we walked the roadside, shovels hefted over our shoulders or dragged along the ground, and step-by-step we tailed the "hot box." The beast belched hot tar fumes and slick black rock vomit from its rear end, and we called out to the driver when we diagnosed a contusion worthy of our consult.

"Ho!" We scooped and dumped our medicine into the wounds, pouring the hot salve into every large scrape or gash, as if the gravel mixture were new dark skin, filling in areas that were faded gray or fallen away.

My boss for the morning, Dick Scott, pointed out an old hole someone filled some time ago. A few years on, it looked like part of the regenerated roadway, thanks to people like him.

"See that?" Scott said. "Years later and good as new. That's why we're here."

Drivers know it. For the most part, they are happy to see these pavement pathologists, these M.D.s of the main drag. After all, they were out there healing sores, some deep, like an abyss, or an abscess, some craggy and ripped, as if torn by a knife, and still others thin and shallow, like cracked, diseased skin.

Can you imagine what would happen to the health of the city if crews like Scott and his men weren't out there? Car-diac arrest, perhaps.

OK, bad joke, but the work itself isn't too bad. You're outdoors 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. It is manual labor, but not back-breaking. And you're doing something that is genuinely necessary, something that pleases your fellow citizenry, as evidenced on this recent morning.

Within minutes, a BMW passed by, the driver yelling a "thank you" from his open window. A group of walkers said the same thing moments later. Occasionally, said the crew, people delayed by the repairs will give them a middle finger, but only 1 in 10 is annoyed.

Most of the time, people understand. They wave happily, they smile, and they nod with appreciation at the good work of the surgeons of the streets.