Gary Fincke

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Subsidence 

My father tells me to drive up Spencer Lane, the first time I’ve taken this route in twenty years. After we make two right turns, he says, “Look.” Morgan Lane is blocked by sawhorses with blinking lights. “Subsidence,” he says, announcing it like an uneasy oncologist. Road Closed is repeated on two signs, but he tells me to keep driving, directing me through a loop of roads to the back side of Stoneridge, the housing plan that covers the hillside near his house. “We can park here and walk back to where we were,” he says.

The houses across the street from the one I grew up in can be seen from where we stand. My friends and I had hiked all over this hillside and the woods just below that street until the houses sprang up when I was in high school. “Where were the mines?” I say, and he surprises me by smiling.

“They started at the boney pile you were afraid of,” he says.

“I thought all that was from a strip mine,” I say, recalling the details of my humiliation, how I dropped to my knees on the high, narrow path and said NO to further climbing in front of fifteen Boy Scouts and my father, the Scoutmaster.

The tunnels started down there and spidered up through the woods. The company shut down when I was a boy, and now the tunnels look to be caving in. My father had led me back down the narrow trail. He’d walked in front of me without speaking until we reached the road where after a few minutes, the other Scouts and my father’s assistant arrived. Nobody, not my father or even the other Boy Scouts, had ever mentioned my failure again. Now, he leads me back toward the sawhorses and the blinking lights to walk the closed streets, and we pass mailboxes tipping toward sunken yards, houses with heavy equipment parked near the shrubbery, a likely sign of cracked foundations. The lights are out in every house. If anyone else is taking a walking tour, we don’t see them.

Fifteen minutes later, my father has me park near the fire hall, where a meeting has already begun with township officials and a set of engineering and mining experts. The hall is packed, every chair taken, a double row of people I imagine are Stoneridge residents jammed along the walls. One by one, sixteen in all while we watch, the homeowners walk to the microphone in the center aisle and voice their protests. Each speech, limited, apparently, to two minutes, is followed by applause whether the speaker is loud or soft, profane or polite.

When an engineer begins to deliver his assurances, my father nudges me toward the door. “Common cause makes a neighborhood, doesn’t it?” he says. “It looked like almost everybody on those streets was in that fire hall, even the lucky ones.”

For the first time in fifty years, I think of the shaft I once saw in those woods, so small it seemed built for a child, boarded over without any warning signs. An older boy had shown it to me six months after we moved into a house from the three-room apartment where I was born. Years later, perhaps because it was so small, I couldn’t even find it.

“The closest one I know of is at the end of our street. Back when we had sewers put in, forty years ago now, I thought the Millers were kidding when they said they didn’t need to tap in because that mine shaft came in handy. I thought they were either cheap or stupid, but I never even saw a sign of a septic tank, none of that telltale rich green you get from having one.”

“The mines are that close?” I say. We’re back inside the house, and I catch myself listening through my legs for the first sign of the earth shifting.

“Maybe closer.”

“How much closer?”

He tells me the township mailed him and the rest of his neighbors a map of the mines in question. If he had bought a lot on the other side of the street, he thinks he would be in danger. I look at the walls of the living room, expecting to see cracks in the plaster. “The map doesn’t tell you for sure?” I say.

“You can look,” he says. “The map is hard to read.”

He starts to search for the map among stacks of old mail he’s piled on the dining room table. Because he misplaced his bifocals months ago, he can’t read the map he finally fishes out from under a couple of puzzle books he can no longer use without straining his eyes. According to the map, one tunnel appears to run along the back yards of the houses across the street.

“It looks like you’re okay about this thing,” I say, handing him the map.

He straightens it as if that will make him able to read it. “When I first saw this,” he says, “our street showed so large that it looked like a river.”

It was a levee, I say only to myself, but when he walks down his hallway, his habit of leaning slightly on his better knee makes him seem to be adjusting to a barely perceptible slope with his body.

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