Can You Dig It?

Back when I was nine or ten years old I would often dig holes just for the sake of digging.  I would search out an unsuspecting piece of ground and when a satisfactory spot was located I would plunge in my shovel and dig with all my might.  My criteria for a satisfactory spot consisted of finding soft dirt with nothing edible growing in it.  Digging up unripened garden vegetables was frowned upon by my parents, as was shooting out windows with a BB gun.  How was I supposed to know?  It happened that most of my digging took place in my Uncle's garden.  He lived next door to us and would pretty much let me do anything I wanted to do.  Hence the windows and the BB gun.  So I would find a spot in his garden and dig the merry day away.  Luckily there was an impenetrable clay layer about three feet down or I might still be there digging.

Most folks have a purpose for digging a hole - gold, oil, dinosaur bones, China - but not me.  I was just digging because there was dirt and I needed to excavate.  Sometimes I would fill the hole with water and pretend to have just dug a well.  Coincidentally, this was the same logic used by the government in the recent economic stimulus spending.

My excavations weren't always so large in scale as to require a shovel.  Often a spoon was sufficient.  Not because my ambition was slackened but because it was the proper tool for the job.  With a spoon, for example, if you have the right soil moisture content you can dig a shallow tunnel that is perfectly sized for a Hot Wheels underpass.  I witnessed many an unfortunate 1:64 scale car being buried beneath the rubble of one of these seismically unsound traffic structures.  It usually only took two big stomps and the whole thing would crumble.  You're probably wondering why it took two stomps to crush a six inch archway made of silty loam soil.  Have you ever seen someone do a front flip because they tried to stomp so hard that they missed the ground altogether?  Believe me, it can happen. Occasionally it was even necessary to call in an air strike to finish the job.  I'll just let your imagination run with that one.  (This is where my wife dolefully laments, "Boys!!", and rolls her eyes.)

I'm not quite sure where my desire to dig came from.  If you trace my geneology back to Jolly Old England you will find that many of my ancestors were coal miners.  Perhaps they were calling to me through the ages to remind me of my heritage.  Or, more likely, I have Hobbit blood in me and I was instinctively trying to burrow out a home.  This would explain my excessively hairy toes and less than towering stature.  It would also explain why I have an overwhelming urge to mark "Other" for my ethnicity.  I figure I must be either part Hobbit or part Pygmy Sasquatch.  Either way I would make a terrific candidate for the Circus -- "The Great Hairy Human Cannonball!!!"

The strange thing was that every time I filled in the hole there would be some dirt that had inexplicably vanished.  No matter how carefully I stowed the dirt I always ended up short, which meant that I had to dig another hole to fill in the first.  It was like a Ponzi scheme, only with dirt instead of money.  Eventually, though, it would all even out and I was able to avoid a lengthy prison sentence.  Mr. Madoff could learn a thing or two from me, most importantly that people with sub-par judgement should stick to playing with dirt and leave the money alone.

As I've gotten older my tendency to dig has diminished.  I just don't have it in me anymore and besides, I blister easily.   I'm afraid digging is yet another pastime that is fading into memory.  It makes me a little sad.  Maybe I should go out and dig a hole right now for old times sake.  I can see the headlines now: "Thirty four year old Hobbit-American prospecting for gold in back yard; Simultaneously strikes underground gas and power lines; Explosion leaves crater halfway to China; Unearths T-Rex fossil; Records longest human cannonball flight; Lands safely on unexplained dirt pile."