N + 1 Mississippi

　

In our climate, snow after Easter is heavy, sullen, ashamed of its transience and, therefore, prone to cling stubbornly to utility poles and trees and highway signs. The snow doesn’t even necessarily delight children (except if school is canceled) because the stuff is very wet and encourages bullies to make snowballs and, often conceals mud, so that play is both sodden, perilous, and filthy. The only people who welcome these last embittered snowstorms are the contract snow removal companies, at least those paid by the event as opposed to those who have wagered on the weather and agreed to a flat fee for their services.

At Faith Lutheran, the snow removal service was paid by the episode and, so, any snowfall greater than a half-inch warranted arrival of the truck-mounted plows and the kid pushing the snow-blower along the sidewalk – pay was by the call and not the inch: indeed, for the trucks careening around the parking lot and the kid dancing with the snowblower, it didn’t really matter whether the snow was an inch or a foot deep: the same general strategies applied – the two trucks did their minuet pushing the snow into conical mounds at the perimeter of the parking lot and the kid in the orange hood and blue snowmobile mittens shot the snow off the sidewalks and into the bushes and shrubs that were already heavily laden and, with the work of a half hour, the job was done whether a dusting or a blizzard.

So the snow came down in a final unseasonable assault by the winter and the two trucks masked by orange plows appeared and the kid with the snow-blower carved his swaths in the wet, heavy stuff and, since this work was done after sunset, the headlights swept back and forth over the parking lot and sent their beams across the snow slumped on the lawn and crushed down to wet ice on the streets and the trucks dropped their plows with a thud, only slightly muffled by the matted snow, and whisked back and forth, cutting down to the asphalt which the blades abraded, sometimes kicking up a little fountain of sparks incongruous amid all the cold and dark and wet, and, apparently, all this plowing and scraping ripped up the asphalt sealing a deep, round hole where the sidewalk dips down near the far end of the parking lot.

The next morning, the lady who volunteered in the office parked close to the sanctuary doors. Our church opens its doors directly onto the parking lot – the fellowship hall is between the sanctuary and the Sunday school wing and the pastors’ offices are an annex built onto the back of the corridor and classrooms. It’s an unusual design and somewhat impractical but an artifact of the way that the church was built in stages as the congregation’s stewardship allowed. And so, the volunteer parked her car at the far end of the parking lot, next to the side-walk, and, therefore, the round cylindrical hole in the asphalt, planning that she would enter the church through a side-door that opened into the Sunday school classrooms. She didn’t exactly fall into the hole but came perilously close to it and took offense at the way that what had once been a smooth parking lot was now pierced with a hole that was "half-invisible" (as she said – although it was open and obvious) descending to God Knows Where since her eye couldn’t discern its bottom, a snare and a trap that she immediately reported to the senior pastor who was, at that time, visiting some elderly congregation members at the Lutheran nursing home on the other side of town. The senior Pastor, Dr. Zwingli Pederson, talked briefly with the volunteer and, then, said he would inspect the declivity when he returned to the Church. The office volunteer repeated that it was a serious hazard, one that was undoubtedly created by the snow-removal service and that they should be summoned out to the parking lot to fix the hole.

The sun was yellow and hot enough to clear the remaining ice on the sidewalks and the trees leaked icy water down around them, droplets pitting the white fields of fallen snow. The pastor found the hole without any difficulty – it was a round, vertical shaft, bottomless at least to the eye, with its sides armored with circular tin or aluminum plating. The shaft was a little larger than a pie tin, probably about 15 inches in diameter. The mouth of the shaft was actually on a low prominence of asphalt and, therefore, didn’t function as a drain. Although Pastor Pederson paced around in the adjacent mounds of snow, wetting his pants to the knees to see if he could sound the drifts for the asphalt or metal cap that had once covered the opening. But he couldn’t find anything. When the maintenance man, Joe, showed up, smelling very faintly of booze, he told the Pastor that he didn’t recall seeing any metal fixtures or lids in that part of the parking lot – he called it "the drive way." "The cap musta been set in the asphalt drive way, sealed in the tar," Joe said. "The blade guy cut off the tar and exposed the hole."

Pastor Pederson called Boris, the man who owned the pickup trucks masked by orange plows, what he knew about the hole. He drove to the church in his black Suburban and squatted down by the hole. "Where does it go?" he asked. "I don’t know," Pastor Pederson said. "Well, what do you want me to do about it?"

"Well, your workers exposed it."

"I’ll see about that," Boris said. He drove away and called a half hour later. "I talked to my boys," he told the Pastor. "We don’t know nothing about that hole in the ground. It’s obviously some kind of ventilation shaft. It’s not something we created."

"Ventilating what?" Pastor Pederson asked.

"How would I know?"

Pastor Pederson sent the Youth Pastor to Fleet Farm to buy a couple of bright orange cones. The youth pastor set the cones next to the vertical shaft. The volunteer lady came from the office, limping a little to dramatize that she had almost fallen down the hole.

"Where does it go?" she asked.

"Who knows?" the Youth Pastor said. He was gay with a red head of hair and a red moustache. He dug around in his pant’s pocket and found a dull brown penny.

Then, he dangled the penny over the open shaft.

"Don’t throw that penny down there."

"Why?"

"You’ll clog it all up," the volunteer lady said.

"Clog up what?"

"Well, I don’t know," she said.

The Youth Pastor dropped the penny and began chanting "One Mississippi, Two Mississipi, Three Mississippi..." and so on. At 15 Mississippi, he stopped.

"I didn’t hear it strike," the Youth Pastor said. "Did you?"

"No, I didn’t," she said. "It must be bottomless."

"Well, it can’t be bottomless, but it’s very deep."

"Very deep," she said.

"I’d better talk to Zwingli," the Youth Pastor said. "We need to get some measurements."

The Youth Pastor went into the educational wing of the church and was gone for a few minutes. The lady volunteer picked up some trash in the parking lot and, then, sat in her car. Zwingli came down the sidewalk with the Youth Pastor – they had a yardstick and bright-beam flashlight.

The aluminum tube was 15 inches wide. The flash light showed mirrored reflections dimming to grey and, then, darkness.

"I can’t see any bottom," Zwingli said.

"It’s bottomless," the volunteer secretary said.

"Bottomless usually means about 42 feet," the Youth Pastor said.

The janitor came from sanctuary toting a panel of plywood just cut with its raw edge leaking sawdust. He came to the aluminum-sided pit and set the plywood over the hole. "There," he said. He replaced the orange cones on top of the plywood.

"That’ll keep people from falling in," the janitor said.

"No one could fall in," the Youth Pastor replied.

The lady volunteer grimaced a little. "Someone could pitch an unwanted new-born down that hole," she said.

"You’d have to cram the kid down," the Youth Pastor observed.

"They’re very tiny," the volunteer secretary and receptionist said.

The next day, Pastor Pederson called the City Engineer. He asked if there were steam tunnels or some other infrastructure near the Church. The Engineer said that the Church was in a residential neighborhood and that he didn’t know why there should be a shaft of unknown depth in that area. He came to the Church and photographed the tube inserted in the parking lot and, then, looked at some topographic maps. "It probably is some sort of drain to the river," he told Pastor Pederson.

At the end of the week, two hydrogeologists driving a State truck came to the Church. They used a plumb line to sound the tunnel but had only 350 feet of measuring tape. The tunnel was deeper.

"Were there military facilities here?" one of the hydrogeologists asked.

"Not to my knowledge," Pastor Pederson said.

"Mines?"

"What would they mine here?" the Pastor asked.

The scientists dropped six blood-colored sacks down the hole. The sacks looked like blister-wrapped chicken liver. It was dye that could be used to track any drainage through the hole.

"You’ll clog it," the Youth Pastor said.

"Clog what?" one of the hydro-geologists replied.



Over the weekend, three local boy scout troops and several interns working for the City waded in the shallows under the river banks. A lot of construction debris had been dumped at the edge of the river over the generations and it was hard to walk amidst the rotting timbers and the shattered pieces of sidewalk and the ham-sized chunks of fractured asphalt with the savage mesh of re-rod eroding through slabs of broken concrete. The densely wooded ravines above the river held suspended refrigerators and TV sets and parts of car bodies. A couple boy scouts cut themselves on broken glass. Toward the end of the day, an intern called out that the river was pink just below the dam. Falling water hung in a silver veil over the dam and the old mill pond upstream still had some ice floating in its center and aggressive robins were strutting and prancing on the turf overhanging the river banks.

The City Engineer verified that the river was tinted pink in the sandy shallows just downstream of the dam, but also found the guts of a half-dozen fish decorating a slab of pavement that extended like a wharf into the stream. On the river-walk on the bluff, a couple of Laotian immigrants were walking away from their fishing hole.

"It’s just fish-blood," the City Engineer said.

No trace of dye dropped into the hole was found.

Pastor Zwingli was off on Mondays and worked only a half-day on Tuesday. The Youth Pastor usually went to the Cities on Thursday night and didn’t come back to town until mid-afternoon on Sunday. So the only day that they could reliably meet was Wednesday. After the volunteer receptionist and secretary had left for the day, Pastor Pederson and the Youth Pastor met in the Senior Pastor’s office. Pastor Pederson ostentatiously shut the door even though the church was empty except for one old lady baking a funeral cake in the kitchen.

"We have to develop a cost-effective plan to get that hole in the parking lot filled," Pastor Pederson said.

"I agree," the Youth Pastor replied.

"We’ve got a few people in the congregation who apparently think that the hole is an opening into Hell," Pastor Pederson said.

"H - E - double hockey sticks," the Youth Pastor said, whistling between his teeth.

"They say that if you put your ear close to the hole, you can hear new-born babies crying down there," Pastor Pederson said.

"Is that true?"

"I wouldn’t think so," Pastor Pederson said.

"Why would new-born infants be in Hell anyway?" the Youth Pastor asked.

"I don’t even believe in the place," Pastor Pederson said, " the whole concept is wrong, inconsistent with our theology: – it’s medieval bullshit."

"Well.... you know: it’s in our Creed – ‘he descended into Hell and on the third day he rose..." the Youth Pastor replied.

"It’s a mistranslation – it should be he descended down to the local garbage dump outside Jerusalem – Sheol right?"

"Or," the Youth Pastor said, "He descended to the dead."

"Whatever," Pastor Pederson said. "You can’t have an infinitely loving God and a place of eternal punitive torment."

"I don’t know," the Youth Pastor said. "I find Hell to be a useful mental category. It’s fun to imagine people I don’t like cooking down there."

"So do I," Pastor Pederson said. "But we’re not talking about theology. We have to keep that in mind. We’re talking about a hole in the asphalt near our sidewalk."

"It’s got to be fixed," the Youth Pastor said.

"I’ll call Darwin Vulture," Pastor Pederson said. "He’s our best resource on things like this."

Mr. Vulture’s pick-up truck was alarming. It had fog lights on metal stanchions that rose above the cab like antennae, a black King cab long and sleek as a limousine, and huge flotation tires, duals in the rear, that lifted the driver’s seat up above the pavement like a throne. The side of the truck, drawn up next to the hole bored into the asphalt, told the world Darwin Vulture was a "dirt man" and that he did business with his sons – the latter insignia was untrue: Darwin was quarrelsome, a trait he had passed to his boys, and the last time he had seen them was in court at a hearing arising out a squabble over the ownership of a half-dozen Ziegler graders. He was small and wiry, a lean bundle of sinew and he wore a baseball cap over his bald head and big round sunglasses that made him look vaguely nocturnal. His beak was bright with varicose veins and shoulders were flared up above his armpits.

Darwin was profane and bullied everyone around him, but he had also made a fortune in his earthmoving and grading business and, so, even, Pastor Pederson was a little afraid of him. Darwin was very old, but he had supernatural energy and there was something indelibly exorbitant about him. For many years, he had served on the Church Council, ordering people around as if the Church were his private corporation and, although the others resented his management style, the congregation had to acknowledge, grudgingly in many cases, that his leadership brought prosperity and that Faith Lutheran Church was successful in outreach, always had new members in a favorable demographic (young professional families with lots of babies to baptize), praised the Lord with several excellent, and well-staffed choirs, and, even, could afford to tithe its support to Mission Work in Burkina Faso (obstetrical and neo-natal clinics). Darwin was tight-fisted and astute with investments and, when he retired from the Church Council, several managers from the Company, capable men in their own right, were required to do the tasks that he had completed on his own.

Darwin slid down off his patent letter throne and stood next to his big truck, blinking at the hole that the Youth Pastor had exposed by kicking aside the orange cones and sliding the plywood off the shaft. Pastor Pederson had been picking up litter from the lawn and putting it in a black garbage bag. He set down the bag and shook Darwin’s hand. Darwin’s had strange hands, mutilated and stubby – he had ground off a couple of fingers both right and left. He wrists were scabby with half-healed dog bites. He big old German Shepherd, Duke, was in the back seat of the King Cab snarling at everyone, bearded with white lather. When the dog suddenly barked from the back of the pick-up, the Youth Pastor who had not noticed the beast was startled and jumped high in the air.

Darwin Vulture told Pastor Pederson that his wife had given him a two-ton crawler-loader with a detachable 100 inch bucket as well as earthmoving blade for his 80^th birthday. "It’s fun as hell," Darwin said. "I take the tractor and just butcher trees, I knock them down in the wood-lot or shelter belt. Then, I push them together and make big piles. You should see them burn. It’s my toy."

"Why are you clearing the trees?" Pastor Pederson asked.

"For shits and giggles," Darwin said.

"No really?" Pastor Pederson asked again.

"Because he can," the Youth Pastor said in a half-whisper.

"Because I can," Darwin said.

He stood over the hole to Hell as if he were going to piss in it, legs apart, mangled hands on his hips.

"How deep?" Darwin asked.

"Bottomless," Pastor Pederson said.

"That usually means about 60 feet," Darwin said.

Darwin squatted to inspect the shaft. He kicked a stone over its edge and cocked an ear to the pit, lips moving: "One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, etc."

"I don’t hear any bottom," Darwin said.

Darwin went to his pickup truck and found a long black baton of a flash light. He pointed the flashlight down into the hole. The Shepherd dog howled mournfully.

Darwin lit a Swisher Sweet cigarillo and leaned back against his truck.

"We’ll have to cap it," he said. "I don’t think we can fill the thing. This means I’ll have to set some kind of metal plug down a couple feet and, then, pour asphalt into the hole until its full."

Pastor Peterson nodded his head.

Darwin Vulture said that a couple months after his retirement, he decided to dig a hole in his back pasture straight down to China.

"How far did you get?" The Youth Pastor asked.

"Well, it’s 7951 miles through the core of the earth to China and I don’t think I got more that a third of that way."

"Why did you stop?" Pastor Pederson asked.

"Molten lava," Darwin Vulture said.

Pastor Pederson looked at him quizzically.

"No," Darwin said. "I got about 20 feet down and I hit a concrete shelf. Turned out to be the roof of a Bomb Shelter that the previous owner had built and fully equipped and, then, when the Berlin Wall came down just plowed under."

"A bomb shelter?"

"Fully equipped," Darwin said. " A dozen 55 gallon drums of water, bags of rice, a whole room full of peanut butter, gas-powered electrical generator – I retrieved that from the shelter."

"Did you know it was there?"

"No," Darwin Vulture said. "But when you dig you find all sorts of stuff: Indian arrowheads, old cemeteries full of bones and hairy skulls and brass handles on the rotted caskets, subterranean rivers..."

He paused: "You know if you were to jump into a bore-hole all the way through the earth’s core, you’d fall very fast at first, but, then, the air pressure would increase so that it would be like sinking down through water. Then, you’d just stop right there, a couple thousand miles down, corked up by the density of the air pressure and cooked alive by the adjacent magma – it’s maybe 1000 degrees down there."

"You couldn’t fall through the earth anyway," Pastor Pederson said. "Wouldn’t gravity pull you back down to the center?

"Right," Darwin Vulture said. "If you evacuated the tunnel, pumped out the air, to avoid the problem of the air resistance of several hundred atmospheres, you’d keep falling and shoot past the core, and, then, fall up, I suppose, toward the surface in China before the gravity would catch you and suck you back down and, then, you’d yo-yo back and forth through the center of the earth until ultimately coming to a complete stop right at the molten core, where it’s like 5000 degrees Fahrenheit."

"Is that right?" the Youth Pastor said.

"You betcha," Darwin said. "But you’d break up anyway long before you got to the core. You see the earth is rotating and the Coriolis effect would hammer you against the sides of the bore-hole, back and forth, until you were pretty much atomized, ripped to shreds.

"I never thought of that," Pastor Pederson said.

"It’s part of the problem of digging a hole to China – you got the air resistence, the deadly heat, the Coriolis effect, and, of course, the fall-out shelter right in the way only twenty feet down with its metal bunks and moldy mattresses and the peanut butter and drums of water."

"Maybe, this is ventilation for a fall-out shelter down below," the Youth Pastor said.

"Or a whole underground City," Darwin Vulture said.

"Some people say it goes straight to Hell," Pastor Pederson said.

"Maybe it does," Darwin replied.

Darwin said that he would call the City Engineer and ask the authorities to treat the shaft as a sand-point well. In some parts of the town, every house had an old sand-point well, hand-dug in the pioneer era – unless properly sealed, these pits oozed pesticides and hydro-carbons down into the aquifer and poisoned the ancient glacial waters there. "We’ll see if we can follow that ordinance," Darwin said.

A couple days later, Darwin came to the church parking lot, his big pick-up flanked by two dump trucks. A few old men who were members of the church stood around kibbitzing. They teased each other, joked with Darwin’s truckdrivers and pitched some pieces of gravel down the aluminum tube. The City Engineer arrived as well to watch the work.

An agile young man climbed down from Darwin’s truck. He was chewing tobacco. The young man squatted next to the bore-hole, aiming a flashlight down the shaft. He dropped a fiber-optic probe plugged into his battered laptop set on the asphalt next to the hole. The screen showed greenish reflections as the probe rapelled down into the darkness. Dangling from the end of the wire, the probe showed the gleaming surface of the circumferential tube with darkness above and below.

The young man said that he was surprised. In his experience, most "bottomless holes" were about 70 feet deep. The probe was hanging 150 feet below the surface.

"Why would it be that deep?" the young man asked.

"We don’t even know what it is," Darwin Vulture said.

The young man spit on the asphalt. Then, he rolled over on his side and put one of his ears directly over the hole.

"What do you hear?"

"I can’t tell," the young man said. "Voices maybe."

"It’s from up here," Darwin said, pointing to the peanut-gallery of old men, several of them sitting on canvas folding chairs. They were cackling at some joke and clapping their hands together.

The young man got up and went to the pick-up, bringing two white jugs of Chlorox bleach. He opened the bleach and kneeling by the hole poured the fluid down the sides of the aluminum tube. Then, a truck came and funneled a couple cubic yards of washed limestone chips into the shaft. The limestone chips were very white and glittered in the sun. The other truck backed up to the hole and funneled a couple cubic yards of black, sooty Bentonite clay down the shaft. The two trucks alternated dumping limestone chips and Bentonite into the hole. When the limestone rattled down the hole, a haze of snow-white dust stood man-high over the pit. The Bentonite rose in a plume like dark smoke over the shaft.

When both trucks were empty, the young man dropped his fiber-optic probe down the tube. There was no sign of either the washed limestone chips or the Bentonite clay.

"It must go straight down to Hell," the young man said, shaking his head and spitting on the asphalt.

The City Engineer went to the side of Darwin Vulture’s truck and spoke with old dirt man. Then, the Engineer left.

"We’re on our own here," Darwin Vulture said. "He don’t have any good ideas." Darwin pointed in the direction that the City Engineer had gone.

"I’ll fill in the goddamn thing tomorrow," Darwin Vulture said.

Pastor Pederson blinked at him.

"Pardon my French," Darwin Vulture said, "but I’ll cap the son-of-a-bitch tomorrow."

Pastor Pederson blinked again and the Youth Minister grinned.

Darwin couldn’t come the next day or the next. It was raining, a hard soaking downpour, and the fields and woods were wet and half-drowned worms decorated the sidewalk with limp, pink curlicues. The third day was almost dry and Darwin came on the fourth morning with a Ziegler grader fitted with a front-end bucket and a big, ugly-looking auger mounted on stilt-like pads that could be retracted or extended according to the terrain.

Darwin’s men used the auger to twist about twelve-feet of aluminum tubing out of the hole. The aluminum tubing was coiled into spiral, something like the silver skin of an apple pared away from the fruit. Two of Darwin’s helpers jack-hammered asphalt away from the tube to a distance of about a car-length. Then, with his grader, Darwin gouged out a cup-shaped hole down to the raw metal twisted up over the open bore.

The sun was above the trees and the dew in the grass evaporated into a pale haze. Darwin and his helpers drove off to Burger King in the big black pick-up. Pastor Pederson had retreated into his office during the jack-hammering – the heavy concussions gave him a headache. Fragments of asphalt like the pieces of a perverse monochrome puzzle were scattered across the parking lot. A crater with steep, slick-looking yellow clay walls opened downward to the silver twist of aluminum casing.

Pastor Pederson wondered about the voices that people said they had heard echoing in the vertical shaft. On an impulse, he stepped over the rim of the crater and, then, slid down the steep side, launching little avalanches of clay and gravel behind him. The coil of metal casing looked very sharp, a torn blade suspended over the open bore.

Pastor Pederson dropped to his knees and, then, slid sideways, cocking his head toward the metal tube. He closed his eyes to listen. At first, he heard birds singing in nearby shrubs, a truck shifting on an incline, the faint rattle of dislodged pebbles and sand sifting down the sides of the crater. It took him a little while to ease into the sound coming from the hole. It was very faint -- the whisper that you hear when you hold sea-shell to your ear, something tidal, the wash of waves, perhaps, a tiny voice murmuring something unintelligible, the hoof-beats of your heart carrying you along the deserted beach.

Something moistened his cheek. Pastor Pederson sat up and groped at his ear. The razor-sharp edge of the auger-torn casing had cut him and an ooze of blood ran down under his right ear-lobe. He struggled to his feet and climbed half-way up the crater’s side before losing his footing and sliding back down to the bottom. He tried again, got to eye-level with the shattered asphalt and, then, slid back down into the pit. Exertion made him breathe heavily and, when he looked down at this hands, Pastor Pederson saw that they were bloody. After he caught his breath, he lunged at the side of the crater again, but achieved nothing other than a landslide of clay and gravel that buried his feet and ankles. The old men who had been spectators to the previous attempt to cap the Hell-mouth were nowhere in evidence.

A mentally retarded man named Gary lived a block from the church. Pastor Pederson saw him sitting on his bicycle looking down into the crater.

"What are you doing down there?" Gary asked.

"Just looking," Pastor Pederson said. "Can you help me to climb out?"

"Sure," Gary said. He dropped his bike on its side, and, before Pastor Pederson could say anything, slid down into the bottom of the crater.

"Don’t!" Pastor Pederson shouted. But Gary took hold of the twisted coil of casing. He cut himself and stepped back.

"Sharp!" Gary cried. It didn’t look like a very bad cut but the palm of Gary’s hand was bleeding vigorously.

The Youth Pastor had just returned from lunch. His Mini-Cooper was parked at the opposite end of the lot. He ambled over to the crater.

"What are you doing down there?" the Youth Pastor asked.

"We can’t get out – the sides of the hole are too steep and this metal is like a razor-blade," Pastor Pederson said, pointing to the twisted casing.

"I’ll get you out," the Youth Pastor said. He stooped over and extended his hand down to Gary. The retarded man was crying a little because of the gash in the palm of his hand. Gary took hold of the Youth Pastor’s hand clutching him with both of his hands. He started up the side of the crater but, then, fell back, dragging the Youth Pastor into the hole.

The three men sat with the bore-hole between them as if it were fire-pit or a common hearth. Gary cried a little because he was cut, dabbing at his eyes so that his cheek and nose were sticky with blood and ocher-colored clay. After a few minutes, Darwin Vulture returned. He and his helpers laughed at the men in the hole. Then, they dropped down some ropes and, one by one, the trapped men dragged themselves up out of the crater, first Gary, then, the Youth Pastor, and, at last, Pastor Pederson.

Darwin Vulture’s helpers slid down the sides of the crater, snipped off the twisted casing with a tin shears, and set a galvanized wire mesh with half-inch grating over the open bore. They set another grating with 1/4 inch mesh across the larger grating. Darwin Vulture dropped a four by four plywood form into the crater and they poured a couple yards of concrete into the box that was staked around the mesh. They set a lattice of re-rod over the freshly poured concrete and poured more concrete to seal the Hell-Mouth. They put orange-cone barriers around the open crater. The next day when the concrete was set, they dumped gravel into the pit up to grade, carted away the spoil and the broken asphalt and, then, poured a concrete patch over the place where the crater had been. The job cost about 4900 dollars but what else could you do?