Tips Tops Drips Drops
This place presents itself as a tabletop, plain and flat. Like my own tabletop, one end becomes place to sort and stack, to hold items in backup memory, while the regular business of eating and talking goes on at the other end. In Columbus, much of the background activity happens downstream of downtown. On Jackson Pike, strung by the south intersection with 71, you find giant lots holding Liberty Tire Recycling and Fabcon Precast; the Jackson Pike Waste Water Treatment facility sits just down the road. The Scioto runs sheepishly just to the east, with the police impound lot on the other side. There are facilities sieving the river’s savings of gravel to AASHTO M 43 standards, for use in asphalt, golf course sand traps, structural concrete, sidewalk sub-bases. A little farther south, past the Scioto Downs and west of the Rickenbacker commercial airport, the Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant backs up to the city tree nursery, where the beached remnants of the Santa María that used to be docked on the Scioto downtown can still be seen. At Anderson Concrete Corporation Plant #2, past Columbus Castings, Ace Iron & Metal, Pick-n-Pull Cash for Junk Cars: a vast CSX railyard, culminating back at 270 with a nest of logistics facilities and container yards. All of them seem liable to be assumed into the yawning transfer station of SWACO, the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio.
Each of these sites is mostly taken up by its own stock of material to process – blocks of waste, cylinders of water, cones of aggregate. A hill of tires is fed into a shredder, reappearing elsewhere as a smaller hill of rubber scraps. From above, these lots appear as rough swatches of pattern: tips in the form of polka dots, stripes of girder, checks of shipping containers in maroon, mustard, and powder-blue, all stocked with enough room to let a skid loader through. These animated patterns, packed hastily into the lots, add to the bare names of these places to give me some notion of another world out of my ken. But what I will see from the ground, hurried along in my car, is a careful blank, maintained out of the double presumption that people either will not care to see these patterns as they pass, or that they will care so much they will want to inhabit them themselves.
That’s me. I want to come in; I want to know the shape of the organs under the skin. I get tempted along the edges, by the crumbling platforms left behind at Columbus Castings; or the little office at the gravel yard. The caution signs at the temenos around the stockpile reinforce the sense it as a place of ritual danger. I want to walk around the towers of palettes, the sprays of hogweed, the rambling alleys too remote for any grafitti, the lonesome Quonset huts and their heaps of sewer pipe. I project myself past the long sliding gate dotted with reflectors, and into the wild of rainbow puddles and rebar tangles. Is it strange to want to ramble here, instead of the sleepy public parks? And haven’t the people here bought the right to see the consequences of their habits?
At the quarries, people carve down into the table itself. Day out and day in, off behind the piles, they are uncovering epic space. The bedrock here is mostly limestone, the remnant of warm Devonian seas. It was made by corals, ammonites, and armored placoderms, who worked for millenia to gather calcium carbonite into shell. Their job done, they died and lapsed to a solid layer at the bottom. Like the native hardwoods translated into timber and fuel, this limestone was duly scraped up and digested by the settlers. It was quarried for ceremonial buildings, and dragged out to form the early bones of the roads – the base course of crushed stone, the lengths of curb, even the white of the zebra crossings. And it was lent to the Hocking Valley as flux for the blast furnaces, before the finished coal was sent back to the metropolis. Are these stories visible in the vast multi-dimensional hole of the quarry? No, beyond the stray imprint of an animal spiral here and there on the rock. But the strange contours and forms of the hole are their own thrilling prologue to the story.
These quarries, too, have been hid behind berms topped with rough shrubs; they are more sensed than seen, squeezed past on your way to work. Here and there something interesting escapes through the branches – for example, as you go south on 270 from the intersection with 70, the National Lime and Stone Company’s sorted piles peek up above the trees, here aggregate and here squared concrete brittle.
If Columbus has set out an identity as a checkered plain, it is learning through observation of its elders to stake its continued growth on such irregularities in the ground. At the Quarry Apartments, the void has been filled to level to make a scenic lake with fountains; the lake shore of Lake Shore Drive gives a spit of new homes a little dream of Lake Erie. Even my market is being served. The new Quarry Trails Metro Park has taken up residence in the exhausted sections of the Marble Cliff Quarry, once the largest in the United States, and affords views into the still-working parts of the excavation from its cliffs.
To see such holes as banks of value is to refill borrow pits, with the perverse care of a mummy-maker. A living system, having been hollowed, is replaced with precious objects; an old storefront with gaudy art glass, an old dairy with dining “concepts,” an old quarry with kayaks. As with the mummy, a strange alchemy occurs: value appreciates within the dead hole. So the people at large will see the quarry at last, but dimly, between the bandages, wondering with a prurient mind at the form of what is underneath.