Deep in a southern Missouri forest, on a geologic thing called the Ozark Dome, lives Ted Haviland, who gets his water from a backyard well that shoots down hundreds of feet, passing through two source pools encased in a massive web of rock. The topography beneath his home is called karst. It has been described as Swiss cheese, blue cheese, a sponge, a strainer-the point being that it is porous, veined, caverned, populated by underground lakes and run through with innumerable underground streams, which pass beneath the Ozarks like a circulatory system. Anything left on the surface long enough (a tire, a paint can, a collapsed septic tank, whatever) can leach down to these veins. And this is a place where backyard sinkholes are frequently used as dumpsters.
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