Its hot. Damn hot!
Unlike Adrian Crownower in “Good Morning Vietnam,” I say this in all seriousness. My AC unit was running again today. In February for gods sakes. The worst part is, the iceberg in downtown Austin is melting. Well, actually its been melting for some time, but the recent warm weather – it hit 80 degrees today – is making it melt faster than it should.
Austin bought the iceberg from Alaska after it floated into that state’s territorial waters from somewhere up north. Then it was cut up into manageable pieces, trucked and trained to Austin, and reassembled. It now sits in a big puddle of water in downtown Austin as I write this. The City acquired the iceberg with grant money from the state of Texas after a strange fungus started growing and fouling the ice machines in all of the bars on Sixth Street. “We gotta have ice to put in them drinks,” Doris Browing, the owner of Cleo’s Clown House Bar is quoted in the local paper. The Mayor and City Council vowed to fix the problem and viola, Austin bought its very own iceberg.
But all was not smooth skating where the ice was concerned. The iceberg – it turns out – is made of frozen salt water. Not too awful in a margarita, but pretty awful in a gin and tonic. So demand for the iceberg ice melted away. And now the iceberg is following suit. Not only that, there was debris buried in the iceberg and now it is falling out of the ice and littering the parking lot behind the Excelsior Hotel where the iceberg was placed. Just this weekend, a frozen Moose came loose and plopped onto the tarmac. It too is expected to thaw in the freakishly warm weather we are experiencing, but no one wants to claim the soon to be limp moose. Nor does anyone want the two mysterious wooden crates that fell out of the melting iceberg wall. Faint ticking can be heard from one and the bomb squad is keeping a good distance waiting for the crate to explode or not.
What looks like a VW Microbus can be seen embedded in the iceberg and seismic analysis has determined that there is a B-52 bomber locked inside the berg as well. The city has set up a pool and residents can buy a chance to pick the day that the VW or Bomber will fall onto the parking lot. “We gotta make money off this thing somehow,” councilman Gil Shaver told the press.
Most of the other iceberg debris has been fairly pedestrian – ancient arrow heads, a couple of whale harpoons, some old tires, a towel with “His” on it and junk like that. A few nautical items emerged and there was some talk of the Austin berg being the iceberg that tripped up the Titanic, but no such luck. The ship related stuff was all marked with the logo of the Marie Celeste. The most valuable item to turn up so far is a $50 poker chip from the Sands Casino in Las Vegas. But there is speculation that it was already lying in the parking lot before the iceberg got there.
Originally, the iceberg was expected to last until mid July, but current estimates have the berg fading away in late May.