Photo: Zora Duntov, used with permission.
By now you have heard of the sinkhole that opened up
earlier this week in the National Corvette Museum, right? If you haven’t, go
read up really quickly. Caught up? Let’s proceed.
Some time back, when another notable sinkhole was
making headlines (though I can no longer recall which), I was so struck by the
event’s ability to boggle eyes and slacken jaws that I began sketching out
ideas for a book with a secondary plotline centered on the weird and awesome
phenomenon. That book, like its innumerable brethren, was abandoned in infancy,
but its theme has remained lodged in my craw, and, in the wake of the latest
sinkhole news, has renewed its persistent plea for examination. Well, it won’t
be getting its own book. Not from me, at least. But let’s consider, shall we,
just what it is about these gaping earthmaws that fascinates and terrifies and
excites us so.
“Security cameras were rolling Wednesday when a
sinkhole opened up underneath the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green,
KY,” opens Mark Memmot’s coverage this morning for NPR’s The Two-Way. “As we
reported earlier, eight of the iconic sports cars were sucked down into a hole
about 40 feet deep. The museum has now posted videos of the hole opening up,
the cars disappearing and what it looks like inside the pit.”
Well now. If that doesn’t read just like an excerpt
from the script of a summertime action/adventure flick! All sinkhole stories
share common elements that connect them inextricably to the narrative of our
modern society (you’ll have to bear with me on that), but this sinkhole, the Corvette Sinkhole – have General Motors’ PR
people begun branding it yet, or is the word "sinkhole" too rife with negative connotation to willingly associate it with your product? Anyway, this sinkhole paints those connections in such bold hues that
even the most pedestrian among us can’t help but catch a glimpse of their
gleaming lacquer.
The National Corvette Museum, a nineties-era
monument to the Chevrolet sportscar model born in the early fifties, sits on
fifty-two acres adjacent to the only manufacturing plant in the world that
builds the cars today. LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), for
comparison, a seven-building complex considered the largest art museum in the
western United States, takes up twenty-three acres of LA real estate. Granted, massive
building sites in Bowling Green likely come at a slightly lower premium. Weighing
in at 115,000 square feet, the NCM, as its patrons sometimes call it, pales in
comparison to another American Mecca, that Minnesotan mall that measures its
square footage in the literal millions. Still, it’s pretty large, which is the
point of all these crunchy numbers.
Corvettemuseum.org asserts that the museum is
“recognized world-wide for its space-age design and sweeping lines.” (No word
whether that space-age design included environmentally-friendly building
practices, minimized energy consumption, or any other efforts toward
sustainability. We do know, however,
it wouldn’t look out of place sketched into an episode of The Jetsons.)
Let’s pause here briefly to address that dot-org
domain. And no, I haven’t forgotten about the sinkholes. The National Corvette
Museum, despite its being a veritable shrine to a commercial car model still in
production, despite its mission of “celebration” of a specific for-sale
product, somehow maintains the status of a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit foundation.
I won’t pretend to know anything about nonprofit law, so I’ll just leave it at
the fact that I found this rather amusing. This not-for-profit
is, by the way, accepting tax-deductible donations, if you are so inclined.
Now look, I’m not down on Corvettes or the people
who love them. I happen to love a lot of people who love Corvettes. But without
a little background, this story’s not complete, and the fact is, the National
Corvette Museum, inside of which a forty-foot-wide sinkhole has recently opened
up, is a massive monument to modern industrialism. And that is relevant.
We Americans love our cars, no doubt about it. And for many Americans, it’s a love that
speaks to something much larger than an affinity for automobiles themselves.
This isn’t news, but if it’s something you’ve forgotten, you will be reminded
rather effectively in looking back to this year’s controversial Super Bowl ad
in which a legendary voice of the American counter-culture, Bob Dylan,
baffled many of his fans by “selling out” to hawk Chryslers. The entire spot, if you don’t recall, harkened to the spirit of America so many of our
compatriots have long invested in our automobile industry. “Is there anything
more American than America?” Dylan asks in the commercial. (Fun fact: Chrysler is
now wholly owned by the Italian company Fiat!)
The troubadour-turned-trader (and, to much of his fan-base, poor Dylan, -traitor)
goes on to suggest that “what Detroit created . . . became an inspiration to
the rest of the world. Detroit made cars, and cars made America.” Cars made
America. That’s no small statement, and though the ad received plenty of flack,
very little of it came by way of disagreement with that assertion. “We believe
in the zoom. And the roar. And the thrust. And when it’s made here, it’s made
with the one thing you can’t import from anywhere else: American Pride.”
Okay, point made. In America, we have a great big car thing, and suffice it to
say, it’s not just about cars. Here is where people who are annoyed with the
direction I’m heading will counter “No, it’s not just about cars. It’s about
innovation. Determination. Grit and glory. Creativity, ingenuity. It’s about
the marriage of grace and power. It’s about that American Pride.” But we’re not
writing car ads here, people, we’re just looking at the facts.
Facts are, Americans are car-crazy, and cars are big expensive machines that
many people pour huge portions of their time and money into. Cars are human
inventions that have become so intrinsically linked to our every-day lives that
few people can imagine a world without them. A world without roads. A world
without the behemoth factories that produce the cars that populate our roads, and the industry that extracts the crude, and the industry that refines it into gasoline, and the industry that sells it in the gas stations that line those roads. A world without commercials to sell us on cars, and financing plans to help us afford them,
and giant salesrooms in which to shop for them. And that's understandable. But with the emergence of the
Corvette Sinkhole, the earth upon which we small humans have built all of this
has issued us a reminder. “Before you, there was me,” it says. “All you have, I
have given you. And I can take it all away.” Upon the wild face of this sphere
we came into being, and we have altered it drastically to accommodate our whims,
investing, as we did, vast quantities of pride in our accomplishments. The
Earth, with its sinkholes, advises us not to allow that pride to blind us.
“When
the ground begins opening up beneath our feet
and plunging unsuspecting mortals into the abyss, some may be tempted to reach
for the Bible and start predicting the End of Times (and a quick online
search reveals that several of the wackier sort of website have not hesitated
to do just that). But biblical as the story sounds, the sinkhole . . . was
not an act of God but of geology,” we are reminded in Jon Henley’s
fascinating article for The Guardian, What causes sinkholes?
Sinkholes are part of the amazing destructive and
regenerative powers of the earth itself, like volcanoes, floods, and
earthquakes. And with these geological disruptions to the daily routines our
society has established for itself on the surface of this planet, Earth reminds
us we’re not really the ones in charge here.
But as Dr. Anthony Cooper, principal geologist at the
British Geological Survey, points out, "since extremes of sinkhole-affecting
weather – long periods of drought, for example, followed by spells of unusually
heavy and persistent rain – are widely predicted to become more frequent as the
Earth's climate changes, ‘we would certainly expect there to be more sinkholes
in the future’.” (The Guardian)
So what’s the bottom line? Sinkholes are mind-blowing
geological occurrences not just because they have a way of catching us
off-guard, producing dizzying photo-ops and oh-so-clickable headlines. These
occurrences are stunning, in part, because of what they represent beyond their
immediate implications. Sure, in tragic scenarios sinkholes occasionally
swallow up human beings. More often, they make headlines for their destruction
of property. Sometimes, we humans forget where the line is. “It is with heavy hearts that we report
that eight Corvettes were affected by this incident,” reads the
National Corvette Museum’s blog dedicated to the topic, in language commonly reserved
for the loss of human life.
In the aftermath of the sinkhole that has
opened up the ground underneath a giant, man-made institution honoring some of
the man-made machines that contribute significantly to the rapid change in
climate
spurred largely by human activity on the earth’s surface,
it is worth considering that the terrifying awe
experience when we gape at the photographs of these geological incidents can be
attributed, in part, to a subconscious recognition that our superficial human
constructs are tenuous. The legacies we have written in concrete and steel are
not impervious. The Earth is more powerful than we who populate it. And if we
do not move forward with greater respect for our planetary home, we may well
destroy it. Or vice-versa.