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.

The Heights They Are Wuthering

About Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

One-sentence summaries of the book:

This is a story of upper class people living on the Yorkshire moors who gaslight each other to death, as told through 3-4 narrators of unknown reliability.

The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, who are all named after previous characters, just to confuse the reader.

If left to their own devices, upper class people will be utterly horrible to each other, leading us to draw the conclusion that without the servant class we cannot have civilization.

This book is Lord of the Flies on the Yorkshire moors.

As we read this book, we feel better about ourselves for at least not being as contemptibly horrible to those around us as the characters in the book are.

The moral of the story is:

Revenge is a dish best served cold, but don’t be too long about getting revenge because you will lose interest in it.

If you are going to be awful to your relatives, make sure that the servants are not listening.

Check the weather forecast before going walking about on the Yorkshire moors.

Write your will early on in your life, so that your sister and not your brother-in-law inherits your estate.

My wuthering thoughts

I am worried that I have read an abridged version of this book - printed books say 280-380 pages, but my kindle version (which does not say “abridged” or “unabridged”) had only 119 pages.  But maybe the printed versions are full of commentary and footnotes. 

This is a book mainly about revenge.  It is also about obsession, enmeshment, gaslighting, psychological abuse, physical abuse, and other utterly toxic relationship behaviors.  It’s bizarre to me that anyone could think the novel is about romantic love.  There is no healthy love portrayed here. It makes me wonder what kind of family the Brontes were, behind closed doors, outside of the public eye.

All the characters have such deep flaws that the reader is unable to sympathize with any of them. Usually I give up on such novels, but for some reason I was compelled to finish the book.

The novel might be about racism, but doesn’t treat it head on. 

When I read this book in my youth, I did not like it.  It seemed to just be full of a few people becoming ridiculously overwrought, with lots of sobbing, in a lonely place.  It still is, but there is much more there - this time I noticed the revenge, class, and race themes.  I also noticed the narrative technique.

What was Emily Bronte trying to say?

Taken at face value, Wuthering Heights seems to say that left to their own devices (on the Yorkshire moors), family members are bound to be nasty to each other.  Given the abuse the characters dish out, the ending seems falsely optimistic.  There is no way that people raised in such a toxic environment can end up having a healthy relationship unless they get a lot of psychological counseling.  

Is it a book against the notion that different classes and races can get along?  Against the notion of parental favoritism of one child to the detriment of the other children?

Heathcliff manages, over 20 years, to get revenge, but it is not any good to him.  Maybe the point of the book is that you should not pursue revenge, as it won’t be satisfying and may backfire.

Christianity is totally bashed.  The obvious Christian (servant Joseph) is a judgmental supercilious creep, and the rest of the characters pretty much reject Christianity.  Is Bronte trying to say that if you reject Christianity, violence, despair, and death will result? Or that Christianity is useless in bringing about good relationships in families?

Was Bronte writing against traditional notions of masculinity?

Maybe W.H. is an allegory!

I have an inkling that Bronte may have intended the book as an allegory about human existence or human civilization.  A novel is deemed an enduring classic if it makes useful commentary on the human condition.   If W.H. is about human civilization, then what does it mean that Catherine and Heathcliff say that they exist one within the other, or that one cannot exist without the other?  Perhaps the enmeshment of Cathy the Elder and Heathcliff is not a weird psychological derailment of the relationship, but is instead a statement about how our human passions are the same, regardless of skin color, and those passions always exist in humanity.

If it is such an allegory, does the reconciliation of the family - through Cathy the Younger and Hareton - imply that civilization can be reached through forgiveness of past wrongs?  Is Bronte saying that yes, we humans can tame our monsters within?  By offering forgiveness, ceasing to point out each other’s faults, and teaching one another how to read, can we learn how to live peacefully with each other?

Joyce Carol Oates seems to agree with the notion that W.H. is an allegory, in this essay. 

Emily Brontë’s sense of the parable residing beneath her melodramatic tale guides us throughout: for we are allowed to know, despite the passionate and painfully convincing nostalgia for the Heights, the moors, and childhood, evinced by Catherine and Heathcliff, that their values, and hence their world (the Heights) are doomed. We acquiesce rather to the lyricism of the text, than to its actual claims: the triumph of the second Catherine and Hareton (the “second” Heathcliff), not only in their union but in their proposed move away from the ancient home of the Earnshaws, is a triumph that quite refutes traditional readings of the novel that dwell upon its dark, brooding, unconscious, and even savage energies.

Economics and world events are not central

There is little in Wuthering Heights about how difficult it was to make a living on the Yorkshire moors.  As far as I can remember, the two families are fairly well off and never experience a crop failure, storms killing their livestock, or other economic setbacks.  At the time the novel was being written (1840s) there were a series of crop failures, the industrial revolution was pulling workers from the countryside, and Charles Dickens was writing about poverty.  In the 1780s to 1801, when the novel is set, what’s going on is revolutionary war in the American colonies, revolution in France, the industrial revolution.  But Bronte sets the novel on the lonely moors, allowing the plot to ignore what is going on in the larger world.   It’s sort of like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with all the action confined to a small island, except Heathcliff/Prospero turns to the dark side.

The book leaves a lot of questions unanswered.  

Many readers would view unanswered questions as another characteristic of a classic.  It gives book clubs a lot to talk about.

• Where did Heathcliff come from?  Was he Earnshaw the Elder’s son through an affair? 

• Is Heathcliff mistreated because Earnshaw the Elder favors him, or because he is dark-skinned, or because he is a sudden intruder into the family?  

• Is Nelly telling the truth?  Has Lockwood changed the story that Nelly told him?  Why does Bronte use 2-3 layers of narrators?

Am I all wrong about Wuthering Heights? Looking forward to the discussion at book club.

History of These United States, the month of October

Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar.  I’ve chosen historical items from after 1900, with one exception this month.

Oct 6, 2009

White Louisiana official denies marriage license for interracial couple.

(A few weeks later, that official resigned under pressure.)

Oct 12, 1995

Police kill unarmed Black man in Brentwood, Pennsylvania, during traffic stop.

His name is Jonny Gammage.  He was suffocated by the police officers’ use of force.  Charges against the police officers were reduced or dismissed.  One officer was acquitted by an all-white jury and later promoted.  The US Dept of Justice stated in 1999 that there was not enough evidence that unreasonable force had been used.

Oct 15, 1883 - This is not 20th Century but I am including it to remind myself of where we have been before in this country.

Supreme Court strikes down 1875 Civil Rights Act; legitimating segregation and violent assaults against Black people.

The SCOTUS said that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 did not apply to private entities, only to governments.  

“The Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases eliminated the only federal law that prohibited racial discrimination by individuals or private businesses, and left African Americans who were victims of private discrimination to seek legal recourse in unsympathetic state courts. Racial discrimination in housing, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and employment, became increasingly entrenched and persisted for generations. It would take more than eighty years for the federal government to again attempt to outlaw discrimination with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Oct 18, 1933

White mob of 2,000 people lynch George Armwood in Maryland

Oct 25, 1989  

Boston police harass Black neighborhoods after false shooting charge.

Oct 27, 1986

Federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act signed, creating racially biased 100 to 1 crack/powder cocaine disparity.

A recent attempt at a partial remedy.

Oct 28, 1958

Two Black boys, seven and nine years old, arrested and jailed for over three months after White girl kissed them on their cheeks.

[A mob of White men threatened to lynch the boys and their mothers.]

History of These United States, the month of August

Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar.  I’ve chosen historical items from after 1900. 

From the month of August

Aug 1, 1944

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 6,000 white transit employees strike after eight Black men begin training as motormen on street cars, a job that had been reserved for white men only.

Aug 4, 1964

Bodies of murdered civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman are discovered in a Mississippi dam, nearly two months after their disappearance.

Aug 5, 2014 (a mere 7 years ago!)

Black workers at Memphis, Tennesse cotton gin file discrimination lawsuit after White supervisor uses racial slurs and threatens to hang them for drinking from “White” water fountain.

Aug 10, 1988

More than 45 years after internment of Japanese Americans began, the U.S. government authorizes reparations payments to surviving detainees.

Aug 11, 2017

White nationalists protest removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia; the next day, a protestor dries a car into counter-protestors, injuring 19 and killing one woman.

[The statue of Robert E. Lee was removed on July 10, 2021.]

Aug 14, 1908

After failed lynching attempt, mob of 5,000 white people storms Black neighborhoods, burns Black businesses and homes, and kills Black citizens in Springfield, Illinois riots.

Aug 22, 1905

White people riot in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after Charles Miller, a Black man, enters a public restaurant.

Aug 23, 1989

White mob in Bensonhurst, New York, murders Black teenager Yusef Hawkins for visiting a white girl. 

History of These United States, the month of July, since 1900

Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar.  I’ve chosen historical items from after 1900. 

This is the month of the murders of Alton Sterling (July 5, 2016), Philando Castile (one day later, on July 6, 2016), and Eric Garner (2 years earlier on July 17, 2014).   They were killed by police officers.

From the month of July

July 3, 1917

Four days of attacks on African Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois, leave 200 dead and cause 6,000 Black residents to flee the city.

July 5, 2016

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers shoot and kill Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man, while he is pinned to the ground; video of the shooting leads to major protests nationwide.

July 6, 2016

Police officer shoots and kills Philando Castile, 32-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop for a broken taillight in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his fiancee and her four-year-old daughter in the car.

July 18, 1946

World War II veteran Maceo Snipes is shot in the back at his home by Ku Klux Klan members the day after he became the first Black person to cast a vote in Taylor County, Georgia.

July 26, 1918

A mob of 100 white men and boys protests against a Black woman named Adella Bond for moving into a mostly white neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, leading to days of violence and arrests.

Added - not in the Equal Justice Initiative calendar:

In July 1963, Black girls aged 12-15 engaged in civil rights demonstration - buying tickets to a movie theater at the front instead of the back.  They were arrested and were imprisoned in secret locations for nearly two months without being charged with a crime.

History of These United States, the month of June, since 1900

 Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar.  I’ve chosen historical items from after 1900. 

From the month of June

June 1, 1921  (one hundred years ago)

White people attack prosperous Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and burn it to the ground during two days of rioting that leaves up to 300 people dead.

June 2, 2011 (ten years ago)

Alabama legislature passes anti-immigrant law designed to force immigrants to flee the state; Governor Robert Bentley later signs it despite language that legalizes racial profiling.

(My understanding, after glancing at headlines, is that some parts of this law have since been annulled through court cases.)

June 9, 1963

Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and other civil rights activists are arrested on false charges in Winona, Mississippi, and severely beaten by police while in jail.

June 12, 1963 (3 days after the previously mentioned event)

NAACP field secretary and World War II veteran Medgar Evers is assassinated by a white supremacist in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi, in front of his wife and children.

June 14, 1973

Two young Black girls, 14-year-old Minnie and 12-year-old Mary Alice Relf, are sterilized at a health clinic in Montgomery, Alabama, without their knowledge or consent.

June 17, 1971

President Richard Nixon declares “War on Drugs,” contributing to 700% increase in U.S. prison population by 2007.

June 26, 1959

Prince Edward County, Virginia, avoids integration by closing public schools for years.

History of These United States, the month of April

 History of These United States, the month of April

Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar.  I’ve chosen historical items from after 1900.   

The last item (April 22; McCleskey v. Kemp) is for a court case that some have deemed the death penalty's Dred Scott ruling, that is, one of the greatest failures of the Supreme Court. I had never heard of this court case.

From the month of April

April 4, 1968

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

April 5, 1921

Murder trial begins against white Georgia planter accused of killing 11 Black sharecroppers; he is convicted.  (A more detailed account is here.)

April 11, 1913

President Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet begins government-wide segregation of workplaces, restrooms, and lunchrooms.

April 13, 1947

Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin is arrested for sitting with a white man on a public bus in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and spends 22 days on a prison chain gang.

April 19, 1989

Five Black and Latino teens are arrested for raping a jogger in New York City’s Central Park and spend more than a decade in prison before being exonerated.

April 22. 1987

U.S. Supreme Court upholds death penalty in McCleskey v. Kemp despite proof it is racially biased, reasoning that racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is “inevitable.”

History of These United States, the month of March since 1950

Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar.  I’ve chosen historical items from after 1950.   The last item (March 28, 1951) is well worth reading the story at the link.

From the month of March

March 3, 1991

Los Angeles police beating of Black motorist Rodney King is caught on tape.

March 7, 1965

Police use tear gas, whips, and clubs to attack supporters of Black voting rights marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama; dozens are hospitalized on “Bloody Sunday.”

March 11, 1965

Reverend James Reeb, a white supporter of Black voting rights, dies two days after he is beaten by angry white people in Selma, Alabama.

March 13, 2020

Louisville, Kentucky, police fatally shoot Breonna Taylor, an emergency room technician, in her home while executing a no-knock warrant.

March 16, 1995

Mississippi legislature votes to ratify Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, after having rejected it in 1865.

March 28, 1951

Four white men abduct a 27-year-old Black man, Melvin Womack, from his home in Oakland, Florida, beat him, shoot him, and leave him to die days later from his injuries.