If you’re anything like me (and you are – you’ll just never admit it, even after years of therapy), I’m sure today you are very concerned about this sinkhole in Lewiston. I’m betting the very moment you heard about it, you called your loved ones, took inventory of your most prized possessions, and called in sick for the rest of the week. And who can blame you?
There are two things inherently bothersome about a sinkhole. The first is the sink part. The second involves the troubling notion of a hole into which things can sink.
Few people enjoy the idea of stuff getting sucked down into a dark crater in the earth. We are people who cry like babies when we lose our keys. If we can’t find the remote controls to our televisions, we will pack up our stuff and move to a friend’s house. Which is kind of cool, because he has one of those TVs the size of a picture window and he always has beer in the fridge.
But the point is that we don’t like to lose stuff and a sinkhole is the kind of place where stuff gets lost. A sinkhole from years past was blamed for the ruination of a once-thriving Lisbon Street.
The old-timers describe it as a Utopian place, when Lisbon Street was glitzy and alive, like Vegas. Or like Wilton, before the giant sinkhole there sucked down the casinos, shops and floating sports bars like a gluttonous in-law sucking down the last strand of spaghetti.
They say Lisbon Street was a place visited by princes and princesses who would come from faraway places to watch gladiators do battle in elaborate arenas. They came for the burlesque shows, the street magicians, the fancy saloons where beer was sold for a nickel and you could relax with a massage at the spas upstairs.
The hawkers hawked medicines that really worked. They peddled potions that would cure your monthly pains, shrink that hunchback to a mere bump and melt away warts as effectively as boiling water poured on a sugar cube.
You could walk safely day or night, with whistling gendarmes smiling and strolling, nothing but peacekeeping to do. It was always bright, even at midnight, with storefront beacons shining like the moon. You could get a shave and a haircut for pocket change from a humming man who would ask about your day. There were fortune-tellers who could relate helpful things about your future, sidewalk performers with poodles jumping through flaming hoops, cafes with rotund women who would pinch your cheeks and then serve up heaping helpings of deliciousness.
Dashing young men courted beautiful women in white, flowing gowns. Movie stars visited and lingered long with the locals, seduced by the fairy-tale bliss of the downtown. Counts and emperors wandered to Lisbon Street and were bedazzled by the disarming charms of the people. They ordered their armies to disarm and bade them instead to dance in the streets with the throngs of Lewiston revelers.
Lisbon Street, the old ones will tell you, was Shangri-La without the long climb through the cold mountains.
And then the sinkhole came. Its black, hungry maw opened wide without warning, right there in front of what was then Grimmel’s Saloon and Eatery, near the grand gateway to the coveted Lisbon Street Mecca.
The earth opened up and the beauty and bliss of Lisbon Street was swallowed into its insatiable gullet. The street performers went first, with top hats flying and juggling rings clanging to the pavement. The hawkers went down with screams, bottles of miracles shattering on sidewalks as they fell.
Stars and starlets succumbed quickly to the widening sinkhole, their ornate gowns and spotless tuxedos scuffed and torn as the idols disappeared shrieking into the sucking throat of Lisbon Street. And then the shops. And the saloons. The casinos and restaurants. Before long, all was lost and none of the glitter and gloss remained. When sooty, sad survivors attempted to rebuild the splendor, all they could manage were buildings of scuffed bricks, false fronts and dusty windows. The temple of Lewiston was lost to the carnivorous appetite of the Earth and all that was left is what you see today.
So, yeah. I’d worry plenty about this new sinkhole that opened up like a trap door beneath our feet. I’d worry about the place where you work, the place where you drink, the place where you go to relax after a bear of a day has beaten you down.
I’m not saying bad things will follow. I just have a sinking feeling.
Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can share your sinkhole obsessions by e-mailing him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
