That sinking feeling
Tuesday’s vanishing-car saga wasn’t just must-see TV. It was also a metaphor for the way we live. Keenan,
It’s rare that a piece of off-beat local news footage is quite so on the nose. The kind of gotta-see-this WTF item that ends a TV news segment or makes the rounds on social media — and in the process provides an all-purpose metaphor for the sinking feeling of contemporary life.
I’m talking, of course, about the TTC Wheel-Trans supervisor’s car in the Port Lands. There it was, early on Tuesday morning near Commissioners St. and Logan Ave., after a water main broke and flooded the streets: Car 104, marked with the TTC logo and familiar red and black stripes, its headlights on and the yellow flashers on the roof strobing, stopped at the side of the road.
The supervisor the car belonged to was reportedly on the scene to determine how the situation might affect service plans. The water was up to the front tire wells when a sinkhole opened up and began to swallow the car.
It can seem like the mains are bursting, the puddles are gathering, the ground may be shifting.
As bystanders watched and cameras rolled, the car lurched down, in stages, into the sometimes gurgling puddle. Something gave way and the back passenger-side tire dropped a foot or two, then the whole thing gently levelled lower, inch by inch, until suddenly the hood dropped down underwater and the trunk bobbed up slightly.
“Oh, it’s going!” someone shouted on some CTV footage I saw. But not too quickly. It continued tilting grill-first into the ground, over the course of excruciating, fascinating minutes, until the windshield was submerged, and then those blinking yellow lights. Eventually, the trunk and still-shining tail lights went under, and the car was gone.
You see something like that and think: Geez, I can relate.
I mean, who doesn’t sometimes feel like something like that is happening to them? Or maybe to us?
You’re focused on your dayto-day tasks — jobs you think are important and urgent. Meanwhile, forces you can neither see nor control are colliding beneath you. The corrosion of fundamental, mostly invisible infrastructure that has perhaps been forgotten and neglected reaches a breaking point and suddenly you’re soaking in it.
Natural and human forces grind against each other in undetectable ways over a long period of time until suddenly the very ground beneath you opens up and sucks you down into the muck.
And the lights and insignia and blinking signals that have indicated what you thought was your mission sink with it. “Oh, it’s going!” It’s a feeling that can overtake you sometimes.
Maybe not usually so literally. But as agonizingly slowly and steadily.
I mean, you’ve got your job, whatever it may be — reports to file, orders to fill, goods to deliver, deadlines to meet. You have your commitments to your friends and family, all those birthday parties to plan and school lunches to pack.
And you have your own personal setbacks and goals to contend with: that wonky knee you need to see a doctor about, the treadmill waiting for you at the gym if you can work up the ambition, bills to pay, a novel you always meant to write. And maybe you’re on top of it all and maybe you’re not, but you’ve got those yellow blinkers on and you’re working on it.
But then you step back for a moment and take a look around. Pick a collection of headlines or news items. In a 24-hour digital news environment, with notifications pushed to your mobile phone and scrolling through your social media feeds and ticking across the bottom of your television screen, it all gets you stuck.
It can seem like the mains are bursting, the puddles are gathering, the ground may be shifting. A combination of corroded infrastructure and natural forces and human failures.
A great sinkhole of muck that may suck us all under.
It can feel like that, even if it hasn’t swallowed most of us up. Yet.
Like the TTC supervisor in question, who got back to work immediately to finish his shift, uninjured, if frightened.
Can you relate?