LONG ISLAND’S DEEPEST spontaneous sinkhole appeared yesterday, this time in Garden City’s Sterling Park during holiday festivities. A German shepherd plummeted inside the 180-foot-deep fissure and has not yet been recovered. No other injuries were reported.
This is the third sinkhole event on Long Island in as many years. Experts warn that more are expected. According to Hofstra University geology professor Tom Brymer, “The causes for sinkholes include the continued use of old water mains, excessive depletion of the lowest water table, and increasing periods of flooding and extreme heat.” (See diagram, page 31.) In conjunction with the New York Department of Agriculture (NYDOA), the New York Environmental Protection Agency (NYEPA) announced yesterday that Long Island’s aquifers have not been affected. Residents may continue to drink tap water.
The NYDOA has closed Sterling Park and its adjoining streets to nonresidential traffic during an excavation and fill, which will begin July 7 and is slated to run through July 18. The nearby Garden City Pool will also be closed. For more on the sinkhole, see pages 2–11.
From “The Lost Children of Maple Street,” by Mark Realmuto, The New Yorker, October 19, 2037
It’s difficult to imagine that Gertie Wilde and Rhea Schroeder were ever friends. It’s even more ludicrous to think that the friendship would turn so bitter as to result in homicide.
Connolly and Schiff posited in their seminal work on mob mentality, The Human Tide, that Rhea took pity on the Wilde family. She wanted to help them fit in. But a closer look belies that theory. When the Cheon, Simpson, and Atlas families moved to Maple Street during the five years prior, Rhea did not attempt the same kinds of friendships. Though she welcomed the families with baskets of chocolate and perfume, by their own accounts, she was cold. “I think she was intimidated,” Christina Cheon admitted. “I’m a doctor. She didn’t like the competition for most accomplished woman on the block.” Ellis Simpson added, “Everybody from around here had family to help them out. That’s why you moved to the suburbs. Free babysitting. I mean, it definitely wasn’t for the culture. But the Wildes were alone. I think that’s why Rhea plugged into Gertie. Bullies seek the vulnerable. You know what else bullies do? They trick people who don’t know any better into believing they’re important.”
It’s entirely possible, then, that Rhea had it out for Gertie from the start.
118 Maple Street
Friday, July 9
“It’s a hairbrush night,” Rhea Schroeder called up the stairs to her daughter Shelly. “Don’t forget to use extra conditioner. I hate that look on your face when I hit a knot.”
She waited at the landing. Heard rustling up there. She had four kids. Three still lived at home. She had a husband, too, only she rarely saw him. It’s unnatural, being the sole grown-up in a house for twenty-plus years. You talk to yourself. You spin.
“You hear me?”
“Yup!” Shelly bellowed back down. “I HEAR you!”
Rhea sat back down at her dining room table. She tried to focus her attention on the Remedial English Composition papers she was supposed to grade. The one on top argued that the release of volcanic ash was the cheapest and smartest solution to global warming. Plus, you’d get all those gorgeous sunsets! Because she taught college, a lot of Maple Street thought she had a glamorous job. These people were wrong. She did not correct them, but they were absolutely, 100 percent wrong.
Rhea pushed the papers away. Sipped from the first glass of Malbec she’d poured for the night, got up, and scanned the mess out her window.
She couldn’t see the sinkhole. It was in the middle of the park, less than a half mile away. But she could see the traffic cones surrounding it, and the trucks full of fill sand, ready to dump. Though work crews had laid down plywood to cover the six-foot-square gape, a viscous slurry had surfaced, caking its edges. The slurry was a fossil fuel called bitumen, found in deep pockets all over Long Island. It threaded outward in slender seams and was mostly contained within the park, but in places had reached under the sidewalks, bubbling up on neighbors’ lawns. There was a scientific explanation, something about polarity and metal content. Global warming and cooked earth. She couldn’t remember exactly, but the factors that made the sinkhole had also galvanized Long Island’s bitumen to coalesce in this one spot.
All that to say, Sterling Park looked like an oozing wound.
They never did find the German shepherd. Their theory was that a strong current in the freshwater aquifer down there had carried him away. They’d likened it to falling through ice in a frozen pond, and trying to swim your way back to the opening.