Wishes, Germs, and Gum

I've been in Seattle just a shade over 4 months now, but somehow hadn't heard of the famous Seattle Gum Wall until 3 days before its ultimate demise.

 

According to the story, back in 1991 someone standing in an alley waiting in line to see a movie got tired of their gum, reached their grubby fingers into their bacteria-loaded mouth, pulled out their germ-infused hunk of chewing gum, and mashed it onto the side of the nearest brick wall. Then for the next quarter century, all the lemmings ran off the side of the cliff, and all the pedestrians in that alleyway stuck their gum on that wall.

About 1 million salivary atrocities have been committed there.

Apparently, several weddings have been committed there as well.

So romantic.  So pre-chewed.
Their love will last forever, like a flavor-infused synthetic polymer.

Be that as it may, the gum is officially being stripped down off the wall this week. First, try processing the gag-reflex-triggering reaction to the fact that a wall covered with 2 decades of masticated gum exists, then the surprise that people think it's awesome, and finally the inevitable morbid compulsion to see the dang thing before it's washed off the face of the earth.

 

Today, in the name of experiencing this super gross footnote to history as it unfolds, I went on my own personal pilgrimage to the Gum Wall. Teardown is already underway. There in the alley, working their way downhill from north to south, were three guys with tools, buckets, shovels, ladders, and a spray hose, steadily chipping away at the gum.



A pressure washer and a dude in a Tyvek suit that
made him look like an Oompa Loompa,
waging a war against two decades of oral flora.
The scene smelled vaguely of Doublemint and defeat.

The man in the foreground is using a hammer and chisel,
so it's pretty much like Michaelangelo carving The David.

Every time the pressure washer turned on, the air filled with a fine saccharine mist flecked with JuicyFruit particles wildly flinging in every direction and landing on the brick pavers with the sound of wet rubber. Most pieces were tiny, but not all. This one the size of a baseball whacked against my leg as it fell from the sky like a multicolored meteorite:

Hubba Bubba's Magnum Opus.

Right around that moment while looking at the projectile aggregate of gum chunks close-up like that, it dawned on me: Every one of those nubs of gum belonged to a mouth once. (Obviously. Refer back to the aforementioned gag reflex.)  But what I mean to say is that every one of those wads of gum is tied to a person, a memory, a story.  Did the girl with the wad of grape gum enjoy the movie that night? Was the mouth that produced the pink gob from Seattle or just passing through? Did the dude who left the Big Red get a parking ticket for spending too long at Pike Place that day? Who chewed that blue stringy piece? Was the wedding pretty? Did the marriage last?

 

Somehow, it reminded me of a scene from Goonies when they find themselves at the bottom of the wishing well. Each anonymously wished-upon coin belonged to a person. Each blob of gum belonged to a life.

Stef: Wait! Stop! You can't do this!
...These are somebody else's wishes.
They're somebody else's dreams.
Mouth: Yeah, but you know what?
This one; this one right here. This was my dream, my wish.
And it didn't come true. So I'm taking it back. I'm taking them all back.

Did anyone ever come back for their gum?