In the 1977 “Star Wars” movie, the film’s high point is when young Luke Skywalker turns to The Force to help him guide his one-man fighter so he can destroy the Death Star.

To get to the target, Skywalker has to maneuver around laser missiles, tall towers and enemy fighter planes. Trusting in The Force, Skywalker closes his eyes and gets a precise hit to the reactor system, destroying the station and scoring one for the good guys.

            I feel a little like young Luke when I’m driving through Fort Bend County.

            Let’s start with Avenues H and I in Rosenberg. If “Orange is the New Black,” we’ve got that covered. At almost every intersection on the west end, there’s at least eight orange cones blocking the roadway to keep people from going the wrong way.

Then there’s orange signs warning about the new one-way direction and orange sand bags holding down the signs. For good measure, there’s orange words painted on the road.

            If that’s not enough of a distraction, there’s piles of ripped-up concrete and now-silent mud-splattered earth-moving machines along the route. They’re about the only things that are quiet as people blare their horns at drivers who take their lives into their hands to cross the avenues.

            And don’t even think you can sneakily get around those cones. They won’t damage your vehicle, as I found out yesterday when making a turn onto Avenue I a little too sharp, but they will scare you half to death when you hit one.  

Rosenberg’s not the only place where construction equals progress, or as many of us would attest, construction equals headache. Highway 59 from Rosenberg to Sugar Land is a nightmare. The lanes are narrow, there’s concrete barricades on every side of the road and, no surprise, orange cones that seem to stretch for miles.

There’s always a road under construction through Houston, and I-10 is an orange-cone buffet. We’ve been driving back and forth to Louisiana for over 25 years on I-10, and I have yet to go through Beaumont without stopping for road construction and, yes, orange cones.

As bad as the cones are, they don’t hold a candle to the concrete barriers road crews put up on either side of the road when they’re working on the shoulders.

I know they’re for safety, but those walls are intimidating because they seem to be about six inches from my fender.

A writer once compared driving along those types of roads to being shot out of a pin-ball machine. For me, it has to be what being shot out of a cannon feels like.

Officials tell us the orange cones and street demolition are temporary. At the end of the Rosenberg project, people should be happily humming along down the one-way streets, wrecks will be non-existent and the birds will be chirping away in the trees.

Until then, the sounds we’ll be hearing is music blaring from car radios, people honking their horns at drivers texting on their phones, oblivious to the traffic, and screeching tires from motorists who somehow forgot that those two avenues are now one-way streets.

But until that magic day arrives, which will probably be in the year 2050, we’ll have to hope The Force is with us as we grip the steering wheel and wind our way through the orange-barrel Death Star corridors.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.