Vic Socotra

13 June 2008

Rapture, Part Dieux

The Bob Peck Saucer, 1966-2008

The winds of change are here, and they may or may not be associated with another one of those fierce storm fronts.

This gale hit me hard. It shouldn’t have. The new subsidized housing block has hit the second story in frame construction across the parking lot from Big Pink. I try to check the everyone morning, though t is a little out of the way on the morning commute. It adds only a minute or so, since there is not yet a lot of traffic on Pershing, and I can monitor the progress of construction.

If you continue down through the core of the old Buckingham neighborhood to the day-labor parking lot next to the Hispanic Market, there have been big changes, too. The County finished the intersection upgrade, and the lines have been put underground.

It is just in time for the major construction on the north and south sides of the street, the two large new multi-purpose buildings that will destroy all the nice new concrete.

In Arlington, the change has an edge like the storm fronts. There is something abroad in the land that is growing in power. I don't know if it is the Cedar River in Iowa, ten feet over flood stage and rising, is the harbinger of the end of the world, but it is the end of something.

People are losing their homes in neighborhoods the insurance companies said would flood only twice a millennium. Boy Scouts are clinging to trees as an unusually high number of twisters rake the soil of the soggy Midwest.

Oh, sure, look at the hills. The world is an old place, and the wide valleys were carved by something vast, not the little streams and creeks that we know most times. There must have been great torrents that carved this terrain we trod upon so casually. This is not the end of the world, though the violence in the sky suggests that it could be the beginning of it.

So, as we shrug ourselves into this particular it is hard to argue that something is not going on. I’m suspicious by nature, and have taken to looking in the offices of my co-workers who wear their faith most proudly to see if they have reported for work, or risen with the rapture over night.

I don't know how you deal with the apocalypse and still draw a paycheck, so I imagine that is part of the process. I know that change is as natural as the rotation of the planet. I turned left onto Glebe and drove over the spot where the old segregated swimming pool once stood, and past the new professional hockey rink they had added to the top of the Ballston Mall parking structure. The County plans to install a world-class Miniature Golf concession in the vacant lot there, and I await its arrival with great anticipation.

North of Ted’s Montana Grill, I had to dodge a line of buses outside the Westin Hotel, a fairly new arrival to the west end of the neighborhood that peters out at the concrete of I-66.

There were a dozen Arlington motorcycle cops just beyond them, invisible as I approached, and the last thing I wanted to do was sideswipe the police in the Hubrismobile. Consequently, it took my brain a moment to register the fact that the saucer had departed, and the rapture might have happened overnight.

Don’t get me wrong. I fully expect to be left behind. That wasn’t the issue, but I view the event of a key indicator of economic health. I saw no people rising from the pavement as I negotiated the turn up the alley toward the parking garage, but I had difficulty keeping the car under control.

The Saucer was gone!

I avoided turning into the loading dock, the aperture of which is identical to, and right alongside that of the entrance to the steep ramp that descends to the garage that underlies this entire block. It is four levels deep, and the pit must have been spectacular when they excavated it. It is so deep that the elevators to not go to the lowest level, where the unhappy late-arrivers must leave their cars in the warmth near the earth’s core and clamber a flight up on concrete stairs.

The developers said they were going to keep the façade of the car dealership, which was the last example of Googie Architecture in the County. It was a bizarre cookie-cut aluminum pie-pan that hovered over the glass of the old showroom. The press release said that something would be preserved, a quotation of the past

Despite the press release, it looks like they might have lied. The bastards. I administered a sharp mental kick. Why would I be surprised?

Of course, there could be some other rational explanation. Perhaps the engineers had come in the night and carefully disassembled the structure, crating it up for re-installation at a later date. Maybe the fanciful metal future with the florescent lights was safely put away in a warehouse somewhere, ready to come back to the intersection of Glebe and Wilson all shiny and renewed.

The showroom was backed with a low, unremarkable industrial campus that had serviced tens of thousands of automobiles since the 1960s. I did not mind that disappearing, and when I first saw the bulldozers working on it Monday, they had carefully avoided the historic facade. I had great hope that something of the great age that is passing away might stay at the intersection.

Apparently it is not to be. It is going to have to be a deep pit to accommodate the thrusting twelve-story tower that will rise above it, humming with elevator-pistons and the 23-story mini-scraper that will be erected next to it. It is probably good news. We need more vacant office space in Ballston, and the investment in the site may mean that someone has confidence in the future.

The winds that have blown so hard have shaken me a bit. The wires that carry our power do not seem to be up to the task, nor the substations. To bring more electricity to the region, Dominion Power has proposed a mighty new line that will drive north from Culpepper and Fauquier County, across the magnificent horse country of Loudoun and into the city. The company says It will keep our air conditioning going in the teeth of the winds.

When I used to drive out in the countryside, I would see the protest signs posted prominently on the lawns and nailed to trees. The people out there are fiercely resistant to the change in their sight-lines and views, and the possible effect of the stray voltage on farm animals. I assume the signs are still up, though I cannot confirm it.

I don't get out there much anymore. A drive in the country with the eight cylinders of the Hubrismobile on-line now costs as much as a flight to Cleveland, back in the day, and who would want to go there?

I suspect that something else happened. I don't think the disappearance of the futuristic structure had anything to do with the hands of man.

I think the Saucer people just took a look around and decided it was time to go home.

The Bob Peck Chevy Saucer Today

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