Two blocks away from my childhood home was something we called a “sump.”
I don’t remember the name of the block the sump was on, even though I lived in that house eighteen years straight and visited it for a quarter century more. I think, vaguely, that it might have been on one of two blocks that had the same name but for an additional vowel in one of them. But I’m not certain that that’s so, and even when I lived there, I was never able to remember which street had which name. Nor do I remember what the two names were.
The sump was a depression in a patch of land roughly a quarter acre square. It was set off by a double-height chain-link fence and flanked by split-level houses, identical except for color.
There were two models of split-level in the neighborhood and one model ranch. The split-levels originally cost eleven thousand dollars and the ranches ninety-five hundred and split-level people were always a little smug around ranch people.
What I knew about the sump was that IT WAS VERY DANGEROUS!!!!
One was NOT TO GO NEAR IT!!!
And in truth, it must have been dangerous, because at a time of rampaging development, the pooh-bahs behind this neighborhood let it alone.
Another thing I remember about the sump is that, though it was the first ogre of the neighborhood kids’ childhood, and therefore should have been muddled in our minds with the murderous kings of biblical stories and the shape-shifters of fairy tales, we were all pretty blasé about it. It was our local Moloch, devourer of tiny people, and we couldn’t care less.
Thirty years after the last time I gave the sump a thought, sinkholes became a sort of fad around the nation. Men, nestled in their beds with the new Grisham, were all of a sudden being swallowed up by the earth.
Oh, that’s what the sump was, I thought: a sinkhole.
There were problems with this, chief among them that a salient characteristic of sinkholes was contagion. If your property abutted one, you were on red alert.
Yet two eleven-thousand-dollar split-levels had been built on either side of our sinkhole and had endured there, stable, for sixty years.
I wanted to think that this was because back in the early fifties the situation had been thoroughly vetted—that we’d been safe—but I’m more inclined to believe it was all a matter of dumb luck.
After all, Nassau County is a suspicious place, where the incidence of breast cancer far exceeds the national average.
I have a friend who contends that that’s because of the aquifers.