A large bump had formed in the roadway on Flatbush Avenue at Grand Army Plaza. It was an ideal spot, monumental and fragrant and heavily trafficked at all hours of the day. However, the bump found itself located most unfortunately in one of those stretches of roadway that had somehow been painted out of the line of traffic.

It was a good half foot inside the white striped triangular no man's land between Flatbush and Eastern Parkway. This was a depressing state for a bump whose only real function can be to lift the tires of vehicles as high as possible above the normal level of the road. Most bumps in a similar situation would simply accept their fate and lie there in a pool of self pity and unfulfillment. But this activist bump would have none of that. It decided that if the automobiles would not come to it, it would come to the automobiles. Thus, as summer arrived and the ground of Brooklyn slowly filled with heated, restless moisture till every pore of the Earth was seeping brackish liquids, bump went on the move. With a great concentration of effort never before seen in a local protuberance it managed to start creeping along one side in the direction of the closest lane of traffic.

In this way it became longer and longer and eventually could not be described as a round hill-like obstruction, but more like a long ridge, or more to the point, a furrow of secret underground activity.

By September the bump had succeeded in drawing itself quite emphatically into a lane of fast-paced trans-borough traffic, and the thrill of rolling tire tread flying up in its face were now its, all its. The "Furrow Bump" as it was now known in the obstruction community had become famous throughout the County of Kings, and new bumps everywhere were assessing the value of their locations with a new sense of empowerment.

It must be said that bumps do not enjoy immense prestige among street furniture. Whereas the great arch that so beautifully anchored the plaza at its center was way too important to even notice the bump, other local residents, especially at road level: the traffic lights, stop signs and Johnny pumps of this grand traffic circle, looked upon the Furrow Bump with a disdain that only grew progressively with the bump’s length. The bump reacted to this in subtle ways, puffing up even higher with pride every time a bicyclist was caught off guard and let out an involuntary cry, or when a car would dangerously veer into the next lane at the last moment to avoid the sudden launch into the air. It was perhaps a mean pride, a sour satisfaction, a maladjusted passion, but hey, what did you expect from a bump anyway?

However, the Furrow Bump's success was short-lived.

It had not taken into account the inevitable return of winter, when all the world must shrink back to its semi-frozen winter hibernation. As the asphalt retracted in the cooler temperatures, the weakened upper ridge of the furrow cracked and yawned open. The Furrow Bump had become the Furrow Crack. Wet rain and snow, the liquids that had been of such help in summer, now entered the open wound and gashed deeper into its heart. On occasion the city’s Department of Sanitation, with shocking cruelty, sent trucks to rumble by and spread salt in that wound. The Furrow Bump's new status as crack also attracted the attention of the City's Highway Department, which came around and painted a beautiful necklace of orange paint all around it. It was lovely and highlighted the Furrow Bump’s striking profile most attractively, but it unfortunately also had the undesirable effect of warning motorists from afar to avoid hitting it. Was it this new inefficacy of the Bump’s most salient aspect that caused the Highway people to return several weeks later with painful tools of incision and tubs of steaming tar to repave the famous obtrusion completely out of existence? We will never know, and the Furrow Bump is nowhere to found, so it is impossible to ask it.

However, since bumps do not travel about very much, the news of the Furrow's ignoble end did not spread very quickly or evenly throughout the borough, and even today there are still road impediments in the far reaches of Canarsie and Sheepshead Bay that believe intensely in the continued unqualified success of the Furrow Bump of Grand Army Plaza.

 

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