h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Friday, 6/3/00
Norfolk, Virginia

I pulled into the bank parking lot, into a space butting against a temporary chain link fence, and opened the Wendy's bag and began eating my lunch. A few feet away through the fence, I used to park on the rutted asphalt when I went to Paddy's Irish Pub for lunch. Inside Paddy's would be a crowd of longshoremen and sailors lining the bar and filling the tables. Paddy's special on Thursday, meatloaf, always drew a crowd.

In that spot now was a 10-foot high pile of rubble--broken concrete and bricks and chucks of asphalt. A large yellow machine with steel tracks was on top of the pile and slowly scooped away at it. As I chewed my hamburger into tiny pieces, the loader dumped buckets of the debris into a hopper atop another large machine that roared and belched clouds of diesel smoke and dust. A pyramid of coarse fill grew underneath a conveyor belt that led from the bottom of the crunching machine. On the far side of the fenced in lot, a front-end loader filled a dump truck from a pile of wall board, mangled wood, and corkscrews of steel rebar. Before a cloud of dust hid them, I recognized a jagged section of the beautiful old floor boards from Paddy's joined to several broken joists as they were dropped into the bed of the truck.

I finished my hamburger and backed out of the space. Many of the cars in the parking lot were coated with a heavy layer of dust.