And They Dug

 by Lael Ewy

The old observation about the Grand Canyon, the craggy attraction called out by all airline pilots who happen to fly over, is that it is, after all, just a big hole in the ground.

But we are enchanted by valleys of all sorts, naming housing developments for them; historical towns; our crooners from the 1950s; and America's favorite flavor, ranch dressing, which was originally marketed by Hidden Valley as a do-it-yourself mix, combining many of our favorite things in a convenient package, excepting flags and ammunition and guns.

When we're not busy admiring nature's holes-in-the-ground, we're busy making our own, striping the east with canals, the west with reservoirs, and everywhere with basements and the foundations of buildings.

A main indication that the settlers are here to stay?

They dig a well.

Between our buildings, we dig trenches for pipes carrying in fresh water and sewers carrying away foul, holes for fence posts, power poles, streetlights. In the rural area in which I was raised, to manage the waste we shat out or washed off, we'd dig a "septic lagoon," which nature, being less fussy, would promptly fill with cattails and duckweed, inviting in snapping turtles and redwing blackbirds. Rather than being disgusted with these interlopers, I've come to admire what they make of our muck.

On the subject of reservoirs, my dad helped dig one near Cheney, Kansas, which supplies the bustling metropolis of Wichita and its dependent suburbs with water. Well, my father didn't do the actual digging; he was a diesel mechanic who worked on the heavy earth-moving equipment that other men used to get the job done, the bulldozers and backhoes and front-loaders and such.

So enchanted was he with these diggers that, later, he got a bulldozer of his own, ostensibly to help dig deeper a natural pond on the 20 acres of heaven we owned east of town. But we knew better: it's just fun to dig in the dirt, to see the progress you've made as the hole expands, as the horizon rises, as the hole forms down past layers of grass and topsoil, into the deposits of sand or clay or rock below.

We dug as kids, with trowels or Tonka trucks, with garden hoses, blasting snake holes into the ground until our mom came out and told us to stop.

But she dug, too, and still does: holes for flowers or shrubs, neither hobby exactly nor compulsion; it's just what you do, grow things, and it always involves some movement of the soil, some disruption necessitated by production.

Dad had an acre set aside for a garden of his own, vegetables, of course, and he dug long, shallow trenches for sweet corn, deeper holes for sweet potatoes and tomatoes—the last his personal favorite, the starts going in by April, each delicate plant protected by a half a plastic milk jug against the likely event of frost. We'd often have fresh fruit by June, by early July, a precociousness I've never had it together enough to maintain.

On the reservoir project, dad met many professional diggers, men schooled in holes and the vagaries of their creation. Many of these men had worked as wildcatters and pipefitters in the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, and they had colorful stories, were earthy people with an earthy set of sensibilities.

On a hot day, one of them might say "Hell's only about six-inches deep out there!" as if, with a spade, damnation might be surfaced via one, quick cut.

Other stories cut deeper. One of my dad's favorites was from an oil well worker who accidentally dropped a hammer down the hole they were drilling, potentially damaging the rig. It took many hours of work to retrieve, halting progress and costing the operation untold dollars.

When the worker had retrieved his lost hammer, the foreman said, "Great. Now, you're fired."

To this, the man, thinking quickly and with admirable presence of mind replied, "Well, I guess I won't be needing this anymore," and promptly dropped the hammer back down the hole.

My dad also tells one on himself, about almost getting fired for using one bulldozer to put the one he was working on on its side in order to access the parts he needed to repair.

But these are really stories about how management should properly treat their workers, about how they need to understand their situations and to give them the tools they need to do their work properly, ideas he took with him when he later took an executive track.

From Black English, we have the term "dig" to indicate understanding in a deep way, with the depth of our feelings, our thoughts, our souls aligned all the way down. Even today, as the kids have swirled down with "skibidi" and "rizz" rotting holes in their brains, if you ask them if they dig it, they still do.

We come by it honestly, this digging: notably, the kids continue to go down rabbit holes, something we've all learned from Lewis Carroll, and indicative of the safety many animals have always found underground: rabbits, moles, foxes, badgers, worms and grubs (of course), and even a species of owl or two. The occasional wasp or spider digs or moves in after the fact. Dens and burrows harbor the bigger digging animals; ants collectively create entire underground cities, their intricacy shaming even the complex earthworks undergirding a Paris, a New York, a Rome.

I've so far avoided the fact that when we stay in one place we put down roots, figuratively, but when a plant grows it does so literally, digging by pure force of whatever passes for a plant's will, sucking out the goodness of the very earth itself for its vibrant, verdant display.

I've avoided, too, a philosophical matter: the fact that a hole is a thing only in the absence of all that surrounds it, a thing we build only through negation. For every hole we want, there is material displaced. A pile of dirt develops, a berm, a mound, perhaps a place to play, a set of whoops over which a dirt bike might fly.

A hole is an act of mass selection.

We dig when we die, too, of course, or rather a hole is dug for us. We trust the embrace of that good earth with the remains of our most beloved, knowing that the dirt has both the power to forever remember and the heft to help us forget. It is only within this solidity that the quick may be separated from the "silent majority," a term Safire cribbed from Milton, the memento mori that there, by God's grace, dig I.