You remember when the earth swallowed up those Corvettes? Opened a sinkhole beneath their showroom and had itself an all-you-can-eat-buffet? It was all anyone could talk about in the Kroger parking lot, the Bowling Green Kentucky Corvette Museum and the earth’s maw that had opened under it.
The hotel where I worked saw a pilgrimage then of portly old men with mustaches and cabbie hats, their stomachs tucked into ill-fit jeans. They came into the lobby weeping, clutching at their thinning hair like the oracle at Delphi, asking God or me or whoever else was in the room why this had to happen to those beautiful machines. These were the real deal Corvettes, the ones they put on revolving pedestals so men could come watch them spin like a rotisserie religion. You’d think they spit silk out of their exhaust pipes, the way these guys talked about them.
I was driving a white Mazda that would spit green insulation across the interior if you ran the AC. My opinions on cars ended with the men who stayed at the hotel, all of whom I hated in the passionless way that only an employee can hate a customer: the Corvette convention with its mustache men, the Mercedes convention with its slick douches, the truck rally with its drunk fucks. The town my hotel was in was a hub for car guys, guys who cared about a Corvette museum. This breed of enthusiast would come spinning their collectibles into our parking lot once or twice a year, park the shining money of their machines directly over the lines, coo over the metallic heat, expect me to care. I was customer-service-catty about it. Just because you give a shit doesn’t mean I have to.
The sinkhole had the poor taste to open up on the tail end of winter, when the swamped remains of mud and road salt could play a tune across the parking lot’s custom paint jobs. Each mustache man put a cover over his car and scraped clean only the portion of blacktop surrounding his vehicle, so that the lines between the cars were traced in dirt and ice. Then they’d tromp across the way to the Waffle House next door, though they never managed to avoid the mud stew that surrounded the property. I’d watch them, sinking so deep into the muck that they had to lift their knees higher than a woman in a 1980’s workout video.
Not even half-an-hour from us, Mammoth Cave National Park was still closed for the winter, the longest cave system in the world, longer than they’ve managed to explore. A good chunk of Kentucky is peppered with caverns, the ground perforated like tear-away stamps. You can’t step without falling into something.
My sister worked at the cave for a while. A lot of poor college students wind up working at the cave. I’d wound up working overnights at a motel instead, from 11pm to 7am. The night shift is a lot like a cave in reverse. You sit in this puddle of harsh fluorescent light and look out into an inky inky nighttime. I’d go from work to school for my 8am classes and shamble around like a creature not bred for the daylight.
My sister’s job at Mammoth Cave was to pick up lost things. There’s this one natural balcony built into one of the cave tours, so you can peer through spaces in the rock into a far-away dim. People would always peek a little too far, so that below this balcony is a graveyard of lost wallets, spare change, cigarette butts, the things sent falling.
Darkness underground is different from darkness above. It doesn’t have to shrink behind closet doors and hide itself from streetlights. Darkness underground is thick and soupy and complete in itself. The number one thing the cave tour guides find down below are these miner’s hats sold in the Mammoth Cave gift shop, little plastic helmets with bulbs facing forward. Kids poke their heads over, confident that their LED headlights can illuminate the void, and as they lean further their hubris sends their helmets sailing overboard, like a flipped perspective on a lost balloon, the little light spiraling away into a velvet soft.
My sister would go down into that dark and scoop up whatever things could be found. She drove to work in our dad’s old Daewoo Lanos, which is the one car I’ve ever driven that gets car guys to look at me like they care. Everything else I've driven– a 1993 Toyota Corolla, a 2004 Dodge Grand Caravan, a 2002 Mazda 626– is the definition of a “who gives a shit” car. But a Daewoo is a “no shit?” car.
“No shit,” the car guys say, leaning forward with their eyebrows folding into their forehead wrinkles. “A Daewoo?”
Daewoos are interesting, and they’re rare, but they were never good. This DVD company made cars for a brief period. Famously fucked-up little ugly cars. They only lasted in America for about 2 years and then went tucking their tails back to Korea, where they declared bankruptcy in 1999. Car guys are baffled that I actually sat in one, pulled the passenger seat forward so I could climb over it into the back and push the detritus of my dad's living to the side to clear away a space for myself. The tape player burned tapes all the time, and my dad would scatter the burnt, sharp smelling ribbons of them into the back seat like Silly String. I’d sit on them and the fresher ones would stain my pants with long lines of ink.
I only ever sat in the back of the Daewoo. My brother, who was huge, couldn't even fit into the back, even when it wasn’t full of trash. It was a tiny cramped car, the kind just about designed to give therapy to claustrophobics. My stubby legs could only barely settle in the back themselves.
The only time I sat in the front of the Daewoo was when I learned to drive stick on it. My dad took me out to the parking lot by the soccer fields where the horizon felt like a long inkstain drawn around us. We were in Omaha, Nebraska, where the money had taken us, and where things are flat. I squeaked and broke and eventually crawled the car in circles like a child. Learning to drive stick is like necromancy. You kill the car and resurrect it, over and over.
My dad bought the car because it was cheap. That’s about the end of his opinion on cars.
"A Daewoo Lanos," the car guys would murmur in bafflement, and I would want to smack them for judging my dad’s stupid little cheap little car, which breathed its last choking breath a few miles out from the big underground cave where my sister gathers trash, leaving her stranded on the road for an hour or so before someone could come gather her. But cars are just cars. The car is just a car. I used to take the long way home from my high school job, delaying things by an hour, avoiding my family and our overfull house, driving a Toyota that was the same age that I was. It was leaking steering fluid, so I would drive in long straight lines until I reached the edges of things, and then I’d turn the car around, pulling on the wheel with all my strength to get it pointed back toward the house. It was just a car, but I liked driving it in its long, straight, uncomplicated paths.
Austin was an engineering student I tutored in English, an Appalachian twang with cheekbones high enough that I was sure they were the first part of his face to burn in summer. When the sinkhole opened up, he got dispensation to fly a drone into the Corvette sinkhole to look around--he’d been flying it around the caves all summer--and I gave myself dispensation to tag along. I wanted to see a sinkhole more than I wanted to see the wreckage inside it, one of the world’s newest hollow spaces.
My car got me to the museum, only just, with spit and gristle, an ugly old Mazda bought for $2000, not great at driving even when the roads weren’t slick with potholes. The stereo didn’t work, so I would put my phone on the dashboard and point the speaker at myself and pretend it was fine.
The museum was swarmed with yellow tape and old men in big coats, their hoods pulled tight to hide their weeping, their mustaches just peeking out. They’d set up folding chairs around the perimeter, brought thermoses of coffee and bottles of liquor, prepared themselves for the long task of paying homage to some dead cars. One man fell to his hands and knees in grief, left a muddy angel smeared into the grass when he scrambled himself back up.
We slipped past the yellow caution tape, stomped mud across the tile floor, trailed after each other to the showroom, where a cozy cavern had had the good manners to open itself up right in the middle of a forty-foot circle of bright orange caution tape.
My mom's first car was a bright pale orange 1970 Toyota Corona, bought only a few hours away from my hotel, in a Kentucky town that was a lot like a sinkhole. She bought it and couldn't drive it off the lot. She didn't know how to drive a stick shift.
Her brother had to take her at night to the rich neighborhood, where they had the quiet streets and the long driveways and the empty parking lots. You couldn't find space like that in the neighborhood where my mom lived, crowded with trailers and siblings. The roads in her neighborhood weren’t even paved, were busy with rocks. What rich people pay for is emptiness.
In the dark, the streetlights and headlights competing for attention, or so I imagine, my uncle taught my mother to clutch, release, backward, let it tip back just a minute so it feels like falling, and then put it into gear and go roaring into somewhere, the car gleaming orange like traffic cones, ready to take you somewhere that isn’t here.
A few years back he had a stroke. His wife ran a gofundme to try to get them a handicapped accessible van, and it only made about 200 dollars.
A car is just a car. It's just a car. They’re just cars.
I stood at the lip of the maw with its dead cars inside and felt like I was supposed to feel like I was standing on the precipice of something huge and unspeakable and unknowable.
But I didn't feel that way even a little. The sinkhole wasn’t as deep as you want these things to be, hardly a bottomless pit. These nice old cars, the nicest old cars I’ve ever seen, sat in a shallow grave. It was only a little funny–not funny haha, just funny–to stand there and look at them, dusted with shrapnel, battered like the graveyard of losers from a demolition rally. Or, more accurately, looking like any car my family had ever been able to own. Cars are just cars. Even the priceless ones.
While Austin and his team set up their equipment, I asked if I could yell into the hole, or would that fuck anything up? They let me yell the word Corvette like a yodel, like the Ricola commercials, and their voices hitched themselves up to my echoing laughter. It wasn’t a lengthy process, sending their drone spelunking into this unexplored cavern, weaving it through the debris. We could hear the muffled fan of its motors buzzing underground, like the ghostly call of the corvettes. Austin emailed everyone a copy of the footage.
That night, a man came down to the hotel lobby. He couldn’t sleep. He was thin under his flannel shirt and pajama pants, a concave man, older than my dad but not by much. He was the only one to put together that the girl from the hotel and the girl from the museum were the same girl. He asked how the showroom looked. None of them had gotten in to see the damage yet.
I played the footage for an enraptured audience of one. I hadn’t even watched it yet, couldn’t be bothered. The camera’s view swept from above ground to below ground, the floor becoming the ceiling. We watched it pan through an elephant’s graveyard of fiberglass and polychrome, cars sitting in dirt like Hot Wheels in a sandbox. Even under the ground these cars shine, that’s how polished they were once, but some things just can’t be salvaged.
He started to cry, and I didn’t have the expertise to console him. It was three a.m. so I liked him, with the camaraderie between everyone awake at ungodly hours. A certain time of night feels like it’s holding you in some space together, like the outside world can’t enter once it’s turned off its lights. And because it was three a.m., when honesty comes easier than comfort, I told him that I didn’t get it. They’re nice cars, yeah, but it’s an expensive passion he’s hitched his wagon to. They’re nice cars, but they’re still just cars.
He told me, everybody has something they care about too much. He asked me what would make me feel this loss. I was watching the Library at Alexandria burn in his eyes. I didn’t know that there was anything I cared about as much as he cared about these cars.
I’d visited my friend over the summer. She had some internship trawling the West Virginia wilderness with a non-profit looking to stop mountaintop removal mining in the Appalachian rim. I care about mountains, I love them even, but I couldn’t care as much as those people. The nonprofit head still had the first geode she ever found sitting in a glass case in her office, the kind of little thing you pick up as a kid, but it meant something to her. That was the beginning of her under that glass case.
But there’s a price to passion. She’d started the nonprofit with funds from her parents. She spoke with the measured accent of bigger cities. She had a shiny car parked outside in her own special parking spot, her own special part of the world carved out just for something that was hers. She told me that everyone she meets, she asks them, “what are you doing to save the world?” She made it sound like an inspirational question.
My appetite for heroism felt like an eaten up ice cream carton, every night shift paycheck scooped away by rent and food and gas. My family had never been poor before, but my father had started trembling, shaking, with the hereditary fault lines that had killed his own father, and his company had fired him for it. My father had spent 30 years of his life programming trains for them. When he threatened to sue because they’d fired him a year before he would get retirement benefits, they put up their hands, gave him his pension, and sent him a consolation almost-gold watch with a train carved into it. My parents moved back to Kentucky, my mom’s home state, which had always been the retirement plan, to a house overfull with boxes of books, old printers my dad had dissected, art my siblings and I had made stacked in piles beside the bills, and bottles of pills lined up along the counter. It felt like I barely fit there any more.
My dad wasn’t allowed to drive any more. My mom called me in hysterics, standing behind the Volkswagen so he couldn’t back out of the driveway. He’d sat inside with the intention to go somewhere. The where wasn’t important, it was just that he wasn’t allowed to go there by himself anymore.
She wanted me to tell him to just get out of the car and back into the house, but what could I say to him? It’s just a car?
My parents had only retired a few years before. This was supposed to be the time they spent their money on traveling, going to the big wide views they’d never gotten to see, not on special spoons my dad could use without spilling them empty all over himself.
I wanted to tell the woman at the nonprofit this, but it felt like if I opened my mouth, it would open like an empty wallet. A cartoon moth would fly out of my throat and burn itself up on the light of her geode.
Austin, with his drone and his drawl, had begged for my help once with writing scholarship applications, with displaying his family’s misery for a board of directors. He’d grown up on the mountains, with their opioid crisis and hollow spaces, with his mountains getting their peaks blown clear off by explosives that cut like knives, that crack open the rim and pull out any coal they can find and spill the debris into nearby valleys as if it were something pointless, as if it were for sale in the gift shop at Mammoth Cave, where for $5 a kid can buy a little velvet bag and fill it with rocks from a big wooden trough.
I remember getting one of those gift shop bounties when I was very small, when those rocks felt huge in my hands, when I still mistook fool’s gold for the real thing.
There’s a calculation to it, to the way the earth will swallow up cars and helmets and its own self, to the way it soaks in polychrome and toxic explosive residue and closes itself back up over these things that it never wanted. The people I know who live in Appalachia call this “holler filling.” The woman who headed the nonprofit called it “hollow filling.” That’s how we get a flat earth. We slice the tops off mountains and slop them into empty spaces. We take a spatula and smooth the landscape out like icing on a cake.
Austin told me he dreads interviews, that the people there can never understand him, no matter how much he tries to flatten his accent.
I asked this man at the hotel if he knew how they measure the height of mountains. He didn’t, but I didn’t either until I met people who cared about that kind of thing. They place a radio at the mountain’s base and a radio at its top, and they see how long it takes a message to pass from one to the other. You could watch the idea of that, the thought of it, flicking across the distance from me to this man, the tin can telephone strung between us.
These cars were beautiful things and now they were gone, he said. Isn’t that enough?
A car is just a car is just a car.
Once, on a tour of Mammoth cave, my group got held up because a man had gotten wedged into one of the narrow caverns ahead of us. I wanted to cry, the idea made me so sad. You’re just trying to have a day and you get stuck in some dark tight place.
There’s a big cavern along the tour where the walls slope around in a giant circle. They have concerts there sometimes; the acoustics are wide and impossible, and the light is a pale gold when it hits the stone walls. While my tour waited, we could hear some woman singing in that concert cavern, her voice echoing down the path to us, playing the cave walls like they were strings taped across a shoebox.
She had a beautiful voice, and sound underground is different from sound above. It doesn’t have to compete with forces like wind and car engines and horizons so far that it can never reach them. Sound underground swims around inside itself. It fills every space.
I tell this man, I like cars. Cars are just cars, but I like them. I like to sit in them. I feel safe and quiet and warm in cars. Those cars were beautiful things. Cars are beautiful things. Isn’t that enough? I tell him that I like how muffled the world gets when you’ve just turned the engine off, that brief moment between going somewhere and being somewhere. I tell him that I’ll sit in the insulated bubble of them for hours sometimes, just listening to the quiet.
And after my shift is over I’ll step out into the bleary morning and pray that my engine turns like it’s supposed to. It’s the first car I’ve ever bought, I tell him. The first big thing that was ever mine. And in the morning, I’ll snake its spitting sound out from between two shining curved machines, and be reminded that nothing is ever enough.
Rachel Sudbeck has spent most of her life split between midwestern avoidance and southern insistence. Now she lives in the southwest with a tiny dog, some chickens, and some good people. Her work has been featured in DIAGRAM, the Rumpus, Atticus Review, and River Teeth. She’s working on a book, and she’s happy to be here.
Photo credit: Joppe Spaa