Story Time

So my friend Karl emails me this morning with news that a sinkhole has appeared near his neighborhood. This immediately sent chills up my spine.

For, you see, I have a sinkhole story.

For a good portion of my childhood I lived in Florida. That was back when alligators were endangered and roamed the streets where I lived and also when sinkholes were making a lot of news on TV.

At the time of this story, I lived in a very rural part of the state. And when I say “rural,” don’t be thinking about suburbs. We lived near marshes and swampland while still being only 15 minutes from the beach. We had rattlesnakes in the back yard and we lived on a dirt road. We did not even have “city” water; we had an electric water pump and a well in the back yard. When the electricity went out, as it often did during hurricane season, we also had no water. “Don’t flush the toilets, kids! We don’t know when the power will come back on.” Good times. Our address didn’t even have a street name. It had a route number. “Route 4 Box 257V.” As a kid, I learned to say my address for clarity: “routefourboxtwofivesevenveeasinvictor.” Oh yeah, baby!

Floridian kids are taught in school about the aquifer that underlies the state and brings us all our water. I was even such a nerdy kid that when I saw the news stories about sinkholes, I used the old (hardcopy) Encyclopedia Brittanica to look up what caused sinkholes. Bad idea.

See, what happens with sinkholes is this: Where there’s soft rock like limestone (nearly everything under Florida is limestone), water circulates and erodes it away. The erosion causes underground caves. When the hollowed out spots get too big to support the ground above, it caves in.

I understood this to mean that the ground beneath my feet was not to be trusted. I could crack the earth’s thin crust and fall into a hole in the great void like an impertinent skater on thin ice. I walked around on some days with a feeling of doom under my feet. A truck rumbling past my school would send my heart racing until I saw the actual truck and was convinced it was not the sound of the earth giving way.

Yeah, I was one of those kids.

One night, I woke up from a bad dream, as I often did. (This one was probably about everyone on the earth being killed by a virus except me. That was a common theme.) At these times, I usually headed to the kitchen to eat a whole dill pickle to get my mind off things and then go back to bed. After eating the pickle, I went to the bathroom to wash the brine off my hands. Instead of getting water when turned on the faucets, there was a loud POPPING noise, a mini-explosion, like the pipes had coughed and then a hiss of air. I jumped back from the sink in surprise at the noise. No water. Not one drop was coming out of the faucet. Odd, I thought.

Being a kid, I shrugged off the hand-washing idea and went about using the toilet before going back to bed. I did my little tinkle and pulled the flusher handle. Swirling down went the yellow water, but then that awful hissing noise and no rush of incoming clear water. An empty, dry toilet.

Oh. My. God.

There’s no water that means that the well out back has run dry and it ran dry because we’ve pumped out all of the water beneath the house and the aquifer is dry and now the whole house is sitting on an M&M candy shell that can break at any moment and just like on TV our cars will be sucked down and the house and my parents and my sister and WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Panting and terrified, I ran into my sister’s room. “Kerri, wake up, we’re gonna die!! We’re over a sinkhole! We have to get Mom & Dad out of the house!!!!”

My sister is notoriously hard to wake up and even when you finally get her out of bed she’s groggy for a good while. She mumbled and shambled around her room, looking for slippers in what I thought was MUCH too slow a fashion. She followed me to Mom & Dad’s room.

We tiptoed inside and stared at my sleeping parents. Waking them up was a Big Deal. We had to have a really good reason or we’d have screaming, flaming punishments. (Okay, so we’d be grounded. I was a drama queen, so sue me.) However, I was convinced, based on my extensive research and TV watching, that we were mere moments away from falling into a sinkhole.

“Dad? Dad, can you please wake up?”

Snuffling and grumbling. “What is it, girls?”

Panic was rising in me now. “Dad, there’s no water, nothing but air, and I think we’ve used up all the water under the house and there’s a sinkhole and please don’t let us all die!!!”

Dad rolled over to look at his clock. 3 a.m.

“For chrissakes, girls, the pump is off! We put the electric pump on a timer that turns it off at night so we can save some money.”

Oh.

“Um. So there’s no sinkhole?”

“For peetsake, go back to bed.”

And that’s my sinkhole story.