By WILL NORTH
For The Beachcomber

You may have noticed that it’s pothole season again here in the Northwest. Everywhere else, as near as I can tell, is still under snow. But here it’s a different story altogether: potholes everywhere. It’s as if our roads have a bad case of adolescent acne.

This is a season, I am sure, that is much beloved by island mechanics. They’ll be working overtime just replacing shocks or struts or whatever the heck holds our car wheels to the body (not something about which I am expert). You come limping into Burton Auto or Doug’s (which is not run by a Doug) and get smiles so bright you need sunglasses. Potholes are their friends.

I don’t know about you, but I am fascinated by potholes. (I know, it doesn’t take much to fascinate me.)

I have been looking into the science of potholes — yes, there is an entire department at MIT focused on this very phenomenon. From what I can understand (which ain’t much, since I didn’t go to MIT), a pothole is caused by water lurking in the soil structure beneath a road. The water undermines the surface pavement. I’m thinking, you know, water is water and pavement is way stronger, but apparently not. Then again I’m thinking, you know, on this island is there anything OTHER than water “underlying the soil structure”? I don’t think so. It’s like we’re all suspended, tenuously, atop a slim bed of clay floating on a sea of groundwater. We don’t go out walking; we go out squelching at this time of year. I love that islanders call Vashon “The Rock.” Have you ever once seen a seam of bedrock on this island? Of course not; it’s all refuse left over by the last glacier: mud and gravel. We live on a glacial dump — oh, excuse me: transfer station.

But back to the matter of potholes, and the questions that keep me up at night. First, why do potholes pop up, or rather down, in exactly the same places every season? Ever noticed that? Like, for example, just opposite the Fuller building at Center, among other places. Year after year, there they are, waiting to wreck your car, especially if your car is one of those countless, decades-old rusting pickups, which seem to multiply on this island like rabbits.

Now, let’s be fair and credit the good folks in our public works department who do their best to fill these perennial holes. Can you imagine a more thankless job? Fill them one day, they return the next. Why? It’s a mystery. No one really understands this phenomenon. It’s like wormholes in space or something.

Second, as you know, many of the roads and driveways on our island are paved only with gravel. This is because we are an unincorporated part of the county and therefore a poor backward relation for whom pavement is only something to long for. Here too, however, we have a conundrum (a big word for problem): Responsible landowners on our island repeatedly fill the holes which appear in their gravel drives and lanes, at no small expense, season after season. But the holes reappear, consistently, in precisely the same place, within days. Which raises the deep existential question: Where does the gravel that was used to fill the pothole actually go?

I asked my pal Richard at the Burton Coffee Stand about this. He’s an internationally famous expert in environmental and land use planning. His answer was succinct and scientific: “The new gravel gets sucked down straight to hell.”

And from admittedly my limited experience, this seems a perfectly credible answer.

Third, let’s take a much smaller but no less baffling version of this very same problem: Spring will be early this year. Indeed it’s already bursting. And soon you will be re-potting the root-bound perennials in the planters on your deck or patio. And when you do, you will be confronted by a question identical to the matter of potholes: You will remove last year’s plants, so as to replant them in fresh potting soil for the new season, right? But wait!  Where did the old potting soil go? All you’ve got now is a pot full of roots!  Where’s the dirt gone?!

Ever the intrepid researcher, I spoke to Kathy Wheaton at Kathy’s Corner about this mystery. I figured she’d be the expert.

“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s just like the potholes in my parking lot.”

Kathy Wheaton has no idea? If she doesn’t, does anyone?

Isn’t it the first law of something or other that matter (like dirt) and energy (like filling potholes) can be neither created nor destroyed? Okay, that law was propounded by a French guy, Antoine Lavoisier, a pretty sissy name, if you ask me. He probably didn’t wear Carharts or fill potholes. But if he’s right, still, where’s everything go?

If my pal Richard is right, and he nearly always is, or sounds like he is which is always good enough for me, I’m thinking hell must have some pretty terrific gardens, what with all our potting soil heading down there every year.

— Will North is an island novelist. His latest book, “Too Clever By Half,” the second in his Davies & West mystery series, will be available in two months. For the first in the series, check out “Harm None” at the Vashon Bookshop.