Digging Holes

Uncovering a "whole" truth

The simple-seeming undertaking of digging a hole is a relatively deep subject.

Reflecting on the practice of excavation, I’ve come to understand that there’s a “whole” truth to be learned about digging that applies to everything from burying pets who’ve gone over the rainbow to yard work to the search for hidden treasure.

No, this isn’t the author, just another 1950s kid with a “whole-istic” view of play

I dug my first modest hole in a limestone-walled flower bed in front of my grandparents’ limestone veneer house in what used to be far North Austin, back in the early 1950s. Using a garden trowel, I began mining for what I confidently believed to be nuggets of white gold—in reality, small limestone rocks mixed in with the planting soil.

Grandmother tolerated my small-scale earth moving so long as I didn’t disturb the elephant ears she’d planted, though she did caution that if I dug too deep, I’d end up in China. While that might have been quite an adventure for a six-year-old and opened wonderful new trade opportunities with Asia, I never succeeded in tunneling my way to the other side of the globe.

I dug my first sizable hole adjacent to a rusty, sagging, barbed wire fence in the vacant lot next to the duplex we lived in on the outskirts of then small-town Denton when my mother attended what’s now Texas Women’s University in 1957. My motivation for this hole was not the lure of precious metal but keeping up with my fellow kids. With the hula hoop craze yet to hit North Texas, the older neighborhood boys—much feared fourth graders—occupied themselves digging a deep “fort” in the reddish-tan soil adjacent to the alley behind our duplex.

With multiple diggers, they had excavated a big square deep enough to stand in and wide enough to play in, covered that with scrap lumber and then mounded dirt on top. A kid-wide trench half as deep served as the entranceway. They had made a Sputnik-age Old West dugout that could have doubled for a tornado or fallout shelter, a great if dangerous place to play cowboys and Indians.

Naturally, I wanted my own dugout. But being only a second grader, I didn’t have much success in that regard. The hole I managed to dig went down only two or three feet, barely deep and wide enough for me to crawl into if I really scooched up. I’m sure my mother warned me that I might get buried alive playing in my mini-dugout, but I escaped that phase of my childhood without getting trapped in a cave-in.

Alas, I never got a chance to enlarge my Denton bunker. When Mother graduated from college, we moved to Dallas and our new yard was not suitable for hole-digging. The following year we moved again, this time back to Austin. Soon I was a worldly fifth grader and my only digging was in search of worms for fishing in the creek not too far from our house.

The next time I did some digging, by then a young man, was when I started collecting old bottles. An antique bottle hunter has three options: Buy a desirable bottle at an antique store, find an old bottle on the ground or in a creek bed or dig into an abandoned dump ground. Finding a long-buried old bottle was exciting, but the digging was hard work.

As an adult, I have dug myself into some particularly deep holes in a figurative sense, but I haven’t done a “whole” lot of shovel-wielding other than some occasional digging attendant to yard work.

Some years back, of all things, I shoved a blade into the sod to bury an old roll of tarpaper. I then hunted on a small tract of land on the San Gabriel River in Williamson County and had been working to restore the property to its natural state by removing all the trash that had accumulated on it over the years.

I burned or hauled off a lot of old lumber and junk from the place, but a long-discarded roll of tarpaper stuck out in the woods like, well, an old roll of tarpaper laying in an otherwise pristine outdoor setting. I didn’t want to burn it, knowing that wouldn’t be good for the atmosphere and I didn’t want to tote it all the way to town, especially not after I found a big bull snake in the cannon-like mouth of the roll.

Finally, with the help of my hunting buddy, I developed a plan. Once the snake found another place to hang out, we would place the heavy roll in a wheel borrow and roll it down the rocky hill to the black dirt-rich flood plain below. There, I would dig a hole and bury the eyesore in an environmentally responsible way.

It had rained about a week before, so I figured the spade work would be easy enough. But when I pushed the spade into the ground for the first time, my right knee reminded me why I had gone into journalism instead of manual labor. Finally, with a fair amount of effort, I succeeded in digging a hole about a foot deep and three feet long.

“You know,” I joked to my friend as he stood watching me work, “I have renewed respect for murderers who take the time to bury their victims in shallow graves. Not to mention old-time well and outhouse hole diggers. Burying something is hard work.”

Seriously, those last five words explain why most Texas treasure tales—beguiling as they are—are mere folklore.

A prime storyline in most treasure tales involves the fate of a pack train laden with, depending on the teller and location, either Spanish, Mexican, Confederate, or French gold. Indians or outlaws invariably attack, and to escape, the teamsters are forced to bury their loot.

Think about it. Digging a hole big enough to hide a treasure chest would take a lot of effort and time. Dodging arrows or bullets would make the task even more difficult.

So, what’s the great truth about holes? Unless you’re using heavy equipment, digging them almost always involves a considerable amount of work.

I’m still willing (if less able) to shovel dirt when necessary, but what little treasure I own is “buried” in a fireproof steel safe. All I have to do is dig into my pocket for the key.