A Sinking Feeling

 On Sunday the Common Household Husband said to me, “Did you see the sinkhole in our driveway?”

I said, “You mean, the driveway is uneven.”   I imagined a small divot in the asphalt – inconsequential.  I did not go anywhere on Monday so I thought nothing further of it.

On Tuesday morning I had to go out to fetch something I had left at a friend’s house. I drove out of the driveway and then thought, Wait, did I just drive over a hole?!

I parked on the street and got out of the car to examine the situation.  There was a hole about a foot in diameter in the asphalt of our driveway.  I tried to look down in, but didn't want to get too close.  Maybe it is like a BLACK hole and would suck me in!  I could not tell how deep it was, but there was definitely at least several feet of space in there below the asphalt.  I feel lucky the car didn't plunge into it when I drove over that portion of the driveway.

I have had no life experiences with sinkholes, other than making fun of when the city bus got stuck in a giant sinkhole in 2019 in Pittsburgh.  We shouldn’t have made fun, because that sinkhole formed at the exact spot I and a huge crowd of people had stood on the week before at a political rally.  The bus literally took the fall instead of all of us.   

I was quite distressed about our sinkhole, and asked around on what I should do.  A friend said to call "PA One Call" - an entity that checks on what utilities lie under the ground before any digging occurs.  I did that, and the woman there calmed me down a bit, taking down all the info.  Then, with disturbing visions of piles of cash poured into the sinkhole, I nervously drove off to fetch the thing I had left behind at the friend’s house.

Our decidedly less dramatic
but still alarming sinkhole.

On the way home I started imagining the neighborhood kids falling into the hole.  I decided I should go to Lowe's to buy a traffic cone and some "Danger" tape.   But I thought I had better take another look at the sinkhole first.  As I arrived home, Andy, the person from our town's Department of Public Works, also arrived.  Andy examined the situation and said, "It's definitely the township’s sewer pipe that has collapsed."  This is, or was, a 15-inch-diameter pipe that runs under our lawn from one end to the other.  Andy showed me on a cool map with all the township’s underground infrastructure.  He said the hole was at least 5 feet deep.  Yikes!  Andy covered it with two orange traffic cones and said the township would be back soon. 

Andy takes a photo inside our sinkhole.
I feared for his well-being the whole time.

A friend sent me a link to this timely opinion by Alexandra Petri. A fine piece of satire, sobering up at the end to deliver the true tragedy of that person's evil and heinous behavior. 

It didn’t occur to me until later that day that our sinkhole lies directly in the path of the Common Household Husband’s access to the EV charger in the garage.  The CHH started calling the sinkhole “the gateway to hell.”   And further asked, “Is it a divine punishment?”

In the middle of the night, we woke up. The CHH said to me, “Do you think the house has fallen into the abyss while we were sleeping?”  Gee, thanks.  Now I will not be able to get back to sleep.  I read my book, a chapter about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, definitely not material designed to help me sleep. 

There are some things to be thankful for.  The house has not slid into the abyss.  Yet.  As my older brother pointed out, at least it’s not one of those underground coal fires that sometimes occur around here.

My younger brother helpfully said, “You should drop Cheerios down into the hole.”  This is a reference to this childhood memory:  When we were kids, our parents got us a globe because they were all into education and stuff.  It had all the latest countries on it – Yugoslavia, the USSR, East Germany, to name a few.  At some point the family globe developed a ½” diameter hole.  I think it was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Of course, we kids thought it was a brilliant idea to put Cheerios into that hole.  That was highly educational.  It taught us that once a Cheerio went in there, it was dastardly hard to get it out.  My father was disgusted with our flippancy toward geographical knowledge.

Eastern Europe in the 1970s, about the era of our 
family globe.

On Wednesday, The Director of the town’s Public Works Department Himself and three other Public Works employees showed up at our house.  While the workers installed a steel plate over the sinkhole, The Director explained to me that the township needs to entirely replace the pipe running under our yard. This means much of that side of the yard will be dug up, and three of our trees will need to be removed.  

THREE TREES!  This is devastating.  We will be losing two pin oaks and one red maple.  They were already mature trees when we moved in about 30 years ago.  I wanted them to go on existing forever.    

The Director said the township will pay for all of it, and will even plant new trees for us. I wonder how much time we will have to decide on how many and what kind of trees to plant, and where.  I have an inkling that trees vastly affect the heating and cooling of the house but I don’t know the particulars.

The Dept of Public Works won’t start doing any work until next week at the earliest.  In the meantime, no kids, pets, adults, wildlife, or cars will fall in the hole.  We might be able to get some Cheerios in there, but I am not going close enough to find out.   

I will never feel the same again when I am standing on the driveway to shovel the snow. There will always be the feeling that the driveway could swallow me up at any moment.   

The whole (!) thing reminds me of one of the very best YA novels I have ever read.