A Mountain in Chicago

It was a positively moronic idea from the very jump. You would expect this sort of thing out of an utterly dysfunctional country like China, but as it turns out we have plenty of morons right here in the US to approve such a thing.

I remember shaking my head in disbelief at the magazine article when I first learned of the project. “Chicago to Get Artificial Mountain In 2028”. I stared at the hideous CG-rendering and read the blurb: “Officials say mountain will bring tourism, jobs, and habitat for wildlife.”

It was not April 1st, and this was not a satire publication. Some no-name architect from Russia (or was it France?) had actually gotten not only approval but a hefty sum of taxpayer funding to building this monstrosity of his fantasies. In a city like Chicago you can hardly build a gas station without having to jump through a hundred miles of hoops and red tape, yet this guy got virtually a blank check from the city, state, and federal government to build his loathsome “public art” project.

The grants had already been made, which meant this thing was past the point of just being one of those ideas you read about sometimes that look cool to some people but you know will never come anywhere close to fruition, like a space elevator in Popular Science or a proposal to build a skyscraper out of living material or whatever. This guy had actually come in and said “hey, I noticed your city doesn’t have any mountains. I can fix that.” and was taken seriously.

You would think there would have been a public outcry over the government’s intention to use untold billions of taxpayer dollars to build the world’s biggest eyesore since Mount Rushmore in the middle of a city that already had plenty in the way of architecture and tourist attractions. One of my first thoughts was that this had to be some kind of test. The governments of Cook County, Illinois, and the United States, having gotten away with so much shit over the decades, finally just conspired to see what it would take for the public to come at them with literal torches and pitchforks by doing the stupidest thing imaginable, making them pay for it, and having it be something that many of them would be reminded of constantly because they had to drive past the result every day on the way to work.

Alas, there was no great public outcry, at least not at first. Many people just didn’t believe it was going to happen initially. I talked to one guy at a bar who said he would never believe in “the mountain” until construction actually started.

Then construction started, albeit five years behind schedule, and people started getting concerned. The first thing they did was take the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhood they could find and put it under eminent domain. Like that old computer game SimCity, they just displaced a few thousand residents so they could plop a fake mountain there.

And yet, even as Chicago started to become a national laughing stock, the mountain project actually had ardent defenders. People would write letters to the editor in the leading Chicago newspapers saying the project had been needed for years. Politicians, far from shying away and hoping people would forget they had anything to do with the project being approved, touted how the mountain could be used for scientific purposes in a way that natural mountains could not (let that bit of genius logic sink in for a bit). Some talking head on TV said the mountain would finally be the thing to put Chicago in the same tier of global cities as New York and London. And eventually, I started hearing stories that other cities in the US and around the world were thinking about installing their own mountains.

They never did though, because the project panned out exactly as I had predicted it would. They got a little over halfway done, before the money ran out, and to everyone’s complete shock and surprise (sarcasm) no one who was supposed to know the answers seemed to know where the rest of the money went. They spent a bunch of weeks passing the buck in circles while the EPA started investigating the giant pile of limestone and concrete with a gaping hole in the top as an environmental hazard that they somehow hadn’t thought it would be before the building began. The architect and a couple other project leaders up and disappeared, no doubt fearing prosecution and litigation for something.

I felt no small amount of schadenfreude when heads finally, finally started to roll. Not content to simply watch politicians and bureaucrats face Congressional hearings, I used the massive failure vindictively against anyone I knew who had been on the side of those who insisted that the mountain was a good idea and had attacked and slandered people like me who saw it for what it was. One of my two sisters-in-law, who liked to pick political fights at extended family gatherings in that smug “I’m just making conversation, sorry if you can’t see it my way” kind of way, had once told me I was behind the times and that if I didn’t want to help boost the local economy and help the environment with the mountain I should just move to “Mississippi or some other place where people are more in line with your thinking”. Boy did I have fun rubbing her nose in it when the shit hit the fan. And I didn’t do it in an upfront way that she could easily dodge or defend against. Instead, I would needle her with it in subtle, passive-aggressive ways whenever she would start to get a chip. Like at Thanksgiving, when she started shaming my uncle for being too apathetic about charity in her view, I made a casual comment, not to her but to the table, about how I wondered if anyone had ever heard from the mountain architect since he disappeared. I got a few chuckles, and that was enough to make her squirm and shut her up. A few more times of using the boon to subtly troll her, and she eventually stopped bringing up politics at holidays altogether, something my family is probably grateful to me for.

But having some vindictive fun at my sister-in-law’s expense didn’t help the fact that we were now all stuck with a half-finished monument no one wanted, or had any idea what to do with. The project didn’t have any champions left, so it was never going to be finished, but at the same time cleaning it all up would be at least as troublesome and expensive at this point, not to mention the fact that a new big project would have to be agreed upon to take the mountain’s place, since the government wasn’t going to just give all the poor people their houses back.

This dilemma was momentarily resolved when the mountain unexpectedly became a valuable research site. While rumors were going around that Disney had plans to buy Mount Appelgate (the official name was Mount Sable, but a state politician who had opposed the mountain had brilliantly called it Mount Appelgate after his election rival, who had made the mistake of not retracting his early tentative support for the mountain once it became clear that the mountain was a mistake; even though he never even voted for the project, the name stuck, and it was enough to doom his political career) and turn it into a ski resort, these weird birds flew in from nowhere.

From February through March, an unknown bird species migrated in droves, often at night and during storms. They arrived in the thousands, stopping at Mount Appelgate, driving off the seagulls who had started to roost there, and forming a colony. Naturalists captured some and determined them to be in the swallow taxon. They were similar to cliff swallows, but larger and with much more black coloration. One naturalist claimed that they were from somewhere in South America based on dubious bacteria tests, but no other scientists came out in support of this theory. Like cliff swallows, they built their colony by making clay, mixing dirt with their own saliva. But they made their clay at a much higher efficiency than cliff swallows. They would scour the city at night, collecting suitable dirt as fast as they could and bringing it back to the mountain. Eventually, scientists realized they were making far more clay than was necessary to build their nests.

They came to a conclusion that shocked everyone. Looking back, I think the scariest and most unsettling part about this whole thing was watching scientists on TV desperately beating around the bush when it came to the conclusion they had come to, trying to avoid being the first one to say it out loud but wanting everyone to get the gist. They had concluded that the oversized nocturnal swallows were attempting to finish the mountain.

Whether that was the case or not, they never did it, because Mount Appelgate collapsed a few months later. Long fissures had been showing up, so people knew it was going to happen, and thus there was plenty of footage. The collapse was surprisingly quiet, but caused a mild tremor that could be felt for a split-second around much of the city. It also left a cloud of dust and debris that lingered for more than an hour.

At this point, there were serious proposals to just make it official and turn the site into a literal landfill. But first, naturalists wanted to dig through some of the rubble to see if they could find any dead specimens of the swallows (the flock had been seen flying away minutes before the collapse and were never found again).

They found specimens, but not the kind they were looking for. The specimens they found were fossils. As in, classic bone-in-stone fossils. They found thousands of them embedded in some of the limestone that had been used to build the mountain. None of the workers who had constructed the project had any idea how they got there.