They can grow anything here
Dirt farm, near the airport
Airport. Welcome to ABIA, the sign says. "Austin-Bergstrom International Airport." Formerly Bergstrom Air Force Base. Boring. Functional, but boring. I'm tempted to find a way to attach a giant L to the sign so that it says Welcome to LABIA, which is a welcome I can get behind. ABIA, snore. LABIA, okayyyyyyy!
But I digress. Driving back from a day in the small towns southeast of Austin, I happened on the most remarkable landscape. If you drip a powder slowly into a pile, you get a little cone of the powder. This works for any powdery or granulated substance: dirt, sugar, flour, sand. Think of the sand in the bottom of an hourglass, or of a cinder cone volcano. Good. Now drizzle a second one close to the first one so that the two cones blend together but still have distinct peaks. And then another one next to that. And another and another. . . . You end up with a ridge line of sharp teeth like the edge of a cartoon saw blade.
Now do this with dirt, and make the cones, oh, sixty feet high. And line up thirty, forty of them in a row. And three rows of them receding off into the distance, converging to a vanishing point. And all nice, fresh, brown dirt, too, not yet covered with grasses, nor eroded by rain into funny shapes. What on earth is this landscape?
It's J-V Dirt Company, says the sign across the road. These must be piles of dirt removed from some huge excavations and waiting for new homes in some huge holes.
Or to build overpasses. Like the temporary mountain we had in our neighborhood, which we thought was going to be fill for one giant overpass at the big new intersection. It was about seventy feet high. So tall that the trucks crawling on top of it, making it marginally larger or smaller, looked like toys. No, it was built as storage, then used to fill three smaller overpasses. Little tectonic trucks and dozers built this mountain in a few weeks, then other little trucks and front loaders eroded it back down to ground level over the next six months.
Different meaning for "dirt farm."
Unfortunately, by the time I returned to the location with a camera, the really big piles of dirt had gone, probably consumed by the massive highway construction in the area. All that was left were a couple little piles. I swear they were much bigger, really Texas-size, when I first saw them.
2006-07-16
