As reported by Axios on Friday, the state will apparently let Elon Musk’s Boring Company dig a tunnel from downtown to the airport. The official announcement is reportedly set to arrive Monday. The tunnel would run under Murfreesboro Pike.
This is so great. No, hear me out. This year has sucked. Everything’s more expensive and stupider. People are stealing grandmas. Babies in Gaza are starving to death. We have concentration camps now. And we have to live with just how many cruel and cowardly people have control over our lives. I’d like to go to the movies or to see a show or, hell, even go sing Nathan Evans Fox’s “Hillbilly Hymn” at karaoke to take my mind off how terrible things are, but I can’t afford shit.
I don’t know about you, but I could use a free spectacle. Just give me a Nazi trying to tunnel through the Swiss-cheese rock under our city. Let me wake up every day to news of a completely anticipatable problem that that dumb evil fucker and his friends at the state have failed to anticipate.
I’m not a scientist or a geologist or an engineer. I am, however, a student of Nashville history. So I can make some good guesses as to the problems they will encounter.
Let’s start with the aforementioned Swiss-cheese rock under the city. Long before Chattanooga stole the name, Nashville was nicknamed Rock City. There aren’t a lot of places with thick layers of dirt here in Davidson County. It’s why we mostly don’t have basements. It’s why the people who do have basements sometimes find they’re sharing those basements with dead people. Where there was enough dirt to cover a body, people were buried there, for thousands of years. Not a lot of cemeteries out along Murfreesboro Pike. So if you’re the Boring Company, it’s you versus approximately 10 miles of rock.
But it’s shitty rock. Back in 1912, the Eighth Avenue South reservoir collapsed because the rock under it gave out. You can see it in this amazing picture over at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. (Unofficial Motto: Sometimes it’s easier to understand if you can see it.) The photo shows the stone walls still in big chunks, but the rock that had always been there having decided it would be more fun to be pebbles and dirt.
Stone debris from the Nashville reservoir break on Eighth Avenue South, Nov. 5, 1912
And this tendency for our rock to just decide to crumble and fall out from under things? Not a one-time deal. You know where Nashville put its trash before it went to Metro Center? In the random sinkholes that would form around town.
Let me tell you a funny story. Back in the day, when they were going to dam up the Stones River and make Percy Priest Lake, they had calculated where the lake would be — the Army Corps of Engineers, scientists, smart people who figure out where water’s going to go for a living. (People who aren’t standing in front of the nation in an apparent ketamine dream throwing Nazi salutes for fun, then turning around and poisoning Memphis and having the state say “Now get Nashville, too!”) Actual smart people. And these real smart people had to go to the people of Jefferson, Tenn., and tell them, “Sorry, but your town’s not going to exist anymore. It’s going to be under the lake. You need to move.” And they did. Jefferson is no more. But you can still go there.
Why? Because there were holes in the rock that the smart people didn’t know about, and when the lake started filling up, the water rushed into those holes. Sometimes it popped back up — like the little lake you can see over on the Bryant Grove side of Percy Priest. That’s actually a part of Percy Priest, connected by some underground/underwater tunnel. But look again at where Jefferson was, where the two branches of the Stones River meet up. That was all calculated to be underwater. You can look on the map and see that the little lake that formed is not big enough to account for all the water they assumed was going to be submerging Jefferson.
So where’s the rest of the water? It’s down in the Swiss-cheese holes in our rock. Where, exactly? I don’t know. Does anyone? But hey, it’s not like Elon and the state are putting a tunnel in near Percy Priest ... oh, wait.
And it’s not just large bodies of water they have to worry about. Murfreesboro Pike floods all the time from Briley to Mill Creek. And what about all the underground utility infrastructure this could disturb?
I mean, we all get that Elon’s weird mild failure of a tunnel in Las Vegas — which, so far, just has Tesla employees driving people under the convention center — is in a desert, right? We’ll be the testing grounds for whether he can build in soggy conditions. It’s obvious that hilarity will ensue. I hope someone out at the Opryland Resort and Convention Center is searching through their storage units to see how many of those round rafts from the Grizzly River Rampage are still around, because there’s a good chance those are the vehicles they’re going to need to navigate the tunnel. Hell, is the bear that used to be in the ride’s tunnel still around? We could stick that in Elon’s tunnel, just for nostalgia’s sake.
I mean, in general, I wouldn’t use the Nazi tunnel, but if it were a water ride? I’m trying to be a good and moral person here, but I might. It’s tempting.
Anyway, this is an obvious boondoggle, but it could be a grand boondoggle that we’ll all get to witness and take delight in, for free. And in times like this, a little free happiness is worth a lot.
