Photo by Oregon Dept of Transportation

SINKHOLES

I just hope that when my sinkhole comes to take me, I don’t pull a Gary Dahlrymple. When the Little Free Oracle announced that our neighborhood was next, that the Great Mother was calling her children home, it’s obvious “children” was a metaphor—obvious to everyone but Gary Dahlrymple—since nobody’s seen any actual children around here since the Acid Blizzard of ’76. But there was Gary, sucking his thumb, soiling himself, and then the bawling started. Wet and drippy, snotty, humiliating on so many levels when, given our water-deprived anatomies, it should have been scientifically impossible. Granted, the earth had just literally opened its giant maw underneath his house while he was in his Despairing Room, already despairing, but jeeze-loueeze, I don’t think anybody watching wished he’d been swallowed any later than he was. I’m just glad that Mrs. Dahlrymple’s sinkhole got her the week before, so at least she didn’t have to spend her last days trying to explain her son’s behavior to her friends on the Prosthetic-Ag Council.

I’m preparing for a more dignified exit. I think most of us are. We don’t know exactly when our sinkholes will appear, only that they’re inevitable and that it’s useless now to start shutting off the lights in the rooms where the coal-fired curtain fresheners can run unsupervised, or to stop filling the tar lakes with the Styrofoam containers our Styrofoam Mourning Chairs are shipped in. But when it does happen, I’m definitely going out with my head held high, and not only so that when I’m sucked into my own personal gaping abyss I’ll strike rubble immediately and fall unconscious for the being crushed into dust part. I’m still working on the other reason. It’ll come to me, at night probably, when I’ve lit the Melancholia and I’m chewing the last of my daily jellyfish ration, ah-ha! here’s how I can face my sinkhole with my chin up. Maybe it’s as simple as I gave Her as good as She’s going to give back to me. Hey, now that’s something. Yeah. I think we can all take some pride in that.