By Buster McNutt
I’m about done with Florida. My last straw was actually what I hope was my last sinkhole. It appeared about a half mile from my house on the (wait for it…) dirt road that connects us river rats to the paved road and, eventually, civilization, technically known as US Road 129 but referred to by the locals simply as “the hard road.” The start of asphalt pavement is such an awe inspiring feature in this area that elementary schools schedule field trips for tomorrow’s little leaders and dairy farm workers to gaze in wonderment, the kids sitting on the side of the hard road eating their sack lunches while their teacher reads from one of the most popular local books, Where The Dirt Road Ends.
Supposedly the sinkhole happened because a few weeks earlier a tree farmer decided to clear about 100 acres of his pine trees, and the only way to get the logs to the mill or Pine-Sol plant, or toothpick factory, or wherever they go, was the take US 129, and the only way to get to US 129 was via, you guessed it, our dirt road. To say that loaded logging trucks are heavy is like saying that the sun, habanera peppers, and Danica Patrick in her Sports Illustrated bikini shots are all hot. It is at the very top of the “Well, duh!” list. A couple dozen loaded logging trucks rolling over our dirt road each day is like a couple dozen NFL linemen dancing the Macarena on a giant rice cake balanced on a dozen or so of those $7.99 plastic folding sawhorses from Harbor Freight. It would be like me sucking it in and putting on a pair of 32-inch waist Levis (as if…) and starting that long delayed alternate toe touch exercise routine. Something’s gotta give!
We are talking serious dirt road ruts. Think about the worst pothole you’ve ever seen, quadruple the size, and when it rains watch the alligators crawl out. The county sent in a road grader, but it got stuck up to its axle. The Google Maps overhead view made the road look like a golf course in Heaven when God was having a particularly bad day getting to the greens. And then it did rain for two straight days, and that was all it took.
Understand that the lime rock under most of our land in North Central Florida has the consistency of store brand powered grits, and the water resistance of Alka-Seltzer. And below that we have the Florida Aquifer, which has been so depleted by the agricultural industry and heathen lawn waterers (or so “They” say) that the average distance between the surface of the actual water and the lime rock ceiling would easily accommodate Shaquille O’Neal on a surf board, wearing a top hat, on top of which is Mary Lou Retton, on stilts — not just a lot of structural integrity there either.
Put these all together and you have, to give a shout out to my soon to be published new book, The Perfect Sinkhole. We’ve already sold the movie rights. I think George Clooney is playing the sinkhole (Travolta had a scheduling conflict).
Long story short (it’s not like I’m paid by the word, because I’m not … no, really, I’m not, well, at least not technically), they had to fill the sinkhole.
The other option was — and I kid you not — digging up the sinkhole and then moving it somewhere else where it wouldn’t be a traffic problem. Pretty much every part of America has access to a landfill, but here in our county we also have a Sinkhole Fill, which is actually just a giant sinkhole that we use to “store” smaller sinkholes that the county has chosen to move rather than fill. This actually makes twisted sense, because you can’t just fill a sinkhole. First you have to have engineers come in and measure it, determine the cause, see if it has unearthed any Indian artifacts, or even worse, nests for gopher turtles, which are on the endangered list. To move them you have to get a permit from the Department of Annoying and Brain Dead Regulations. It can take weeks or longer to get to where you can fill a sinkhole. But if you “relocate” it to the County Sinkhole Fill, it is now just a hole in the ground that you can fill with just about anything available, as long as the top 12 inches are the very same lime rock that caused the problem in the first place. Well, that and the logging trucks.
It took a week, but they did fill the (no longer “sink”) hole. They put a steel plate over it for a few weeks, so motorists would feel more comfortable driving over what had previously been a sinkhole roughly the size of their double wide. At least that’s what “They” said. I’m pretty sure the real reason is that if the previously filled “hole” did revert to its “sink” hole status just as a vehicle was passing over it, they could clean the “hole” mess up with a crane and a large magnet rather than a dozen work-release prisoners with opioid hangovers and taped together shovels. We’re a small and relatively “non-affluent” county with limited resources. Most of our county road crew is over at the high school digging out the new tractor-pull field. We’ve been runner up in the State (Class 8A) for the last three years in tractor pull, and the coach said that if we just had better facilities we could go all the way next year. Who knows, it could mean a couple of college scholarships.
So, me and the mizzes are seriously considering moving back to Tennessee. It’s about a 600-mile drive, and as we say here in Florida: A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single sinkhole.
Or something like that. •
