Digging Holes

As a boy, I got lots of experience digging holes.

You have likely heard of the mythical army punishment of digging holes; where a soldier is forced to take a shovel and dig a hole that is 3 feet by 3 feet, and 3 feet deep.  It may be that the army never really made anyone do that, but my dad sure did.

You would have thought it was his favorite punishment for my brothers and I.  But I must admit that it wasn’t just some random thing with Dad, he had a plan.  Once the hole had been dug, we had to sift the rocks out of the dirt and move the rocks out into the driveway to add a layer on the dirt to keep it from being muddy.  And the hole then was filled back up, layer after layer.  We put say a layer of grass cuttings from the lawn and a layer of dirt; a layer of apple cores and skins (during canning season) and a layer of dirt; a layer of leaves in the fall and a layer of dirt.

Each hole that was dug in a different location.  I don’t know this for a fact, but I have always suspected that my father had a map of the yard with each and every hole carefully measured and recorded, dated, and tracked.  Over time, the soil in that yard became the best growing ground in the city.  Rock-free, rich, and airy.  Our house had Apple, peach, pomegranate, fig, apricot and plumb trees.  We grew everything from asparagus to zucchini, and grapes, and berries, and flowers.

Each and every hole was exactly alike.  The walls were true, the corners were square, the floor was level.  I know that for a fact.  I watched my dad check enough of them with a tape measure and a drafting square.

You might think that my dad had to make up reasons to punish us, but that wasn’t the case.  We got into enough trouble that he often had to find other punishments because he had too many holes waiting to be filled.

And that driveway.  If we had really transgressed, we knew it, because we were assigned a hole in the driveway. 

As good as we were at digging holes, the driveway was a special punishment.  It had been driven on for years and years.  And every year we added more rocks, and every winter those rocks got pressed down into the dirt.

The top 6 inches of the driveway sure could work up a sweat.  A hard swung railroad pick would make about a ¼” divot and then bounce up with each swing.

Today, someone would call that hole digging “child abuse”.  They would be wrong.

It was instead character building.  We learned to value work, and we learned to take pride in what we could accomplish.  We learned to reach inside ourselves for strength, and resolve.  It built muscle, and determination.

It built men.

Copyright © 2011 - Marty Vandermolen - All Rights Reserved