HOLES ARE THE ARCHETYPAL PLACE OF DISCOVERY. Who needs to travel thousands of miles to find the new? The most mysterious place on Earth is right beneath our feet.
There are holes for putting in. You put in seed, rootballs, drainage tiles, foundations, treasure, dog turds, the dead.
There are holes for taking out. You take out water, potash, peat, kaolin, potatoes, zinc, oil, the hidden treasures, the ancient dead.
Whatever has come out will eventually go back in again. Whatever has gone in will sooner or later come back out. And I, with my spade or my trowel or my two bare hands, may be the hole’s Balboa.
This is one reason that children love holes. The second reason is ants. In the whole memory of the species, how deeply imprinted is the wonder at those puckers in the earth that disgorge red or black or golden lines and swarms of ants? Or sometimes even the furry one that flies up, the ant lion, controlling at once the land, the air, and that mysterious country underground. By the seashore, children experience the same unspeakable pleasure when at certain seasons of the year, every handful of sand they turn over reveals a dozen squirming isopods, tiny armored dinosaurs or living drills who quickly bore down out of sight again.
The third reason is that holes are difficult to dig. Maybe not for isopods, but for us. Holes seem to have a will of their own. When I was seven, my father and I went to plant a shrub—an abutilon with orange-pink paper-thin petals—in the deep acid loam beneath a cypress canopy. He let me jump up and down on the shovel’s step—which by the way, is what you are supposed to call the two flat flanges on a spade that you are meant to jump up and down on—as though I were on a sinking pogo stick.
That was the easy part. The hard part was to lever the buried spade head back, grasp the shank low, lift the whole mass with the knees. Mostly, I couldn’t budge the full plate alone.
—Could we go play ball now?
—No.
—Is it deep enough yet?
—No. Not yet.
My father used his arm as a measuring stick, comparing the length of the rootball to the depth of the hole. Then, he laid a stake across the surface, to assure that the plant meshed smoothly with the surface of the garden. At the time, I remember, that invention seemed to me to rank with the pyramids and the Colossus of Rhodes. It had never before occurred to me that the surface of the earth was an assembly of holes, each carefully measured to accord in elevation with the others.
We struck a solid rock. My father tilted the shovel in one direction. We hit it again. He tilted it back. Again, the shovel’s blade grated on the stone.
At the third strike, the resistance gave way. The spade sank refreshingly deeper.
But at the same time, the hole began to fill with dark water.
Where did it come from? Was it clean? Could you drink it? Had we gotten water from a stone?
My father scowled. He knew that we had split an underground pipe. Of all the luck! I had known his face to go grim and rigid for half an hour after making a mistake like that. But here he had his son lying face-down, laughing at this beautiful, mistaken water, in the presence of a miracle.
So my father laughed too. And in that laughing, we achieved something real out of all the difficulty and the mistakes. We digested that surprise and let it delight us. We lived for a second in the unknown. We did get water from a stone.
You never know what you will find in a hole, so long as you bother to look. Once, I was on a hike in a wild part of New York’s Central Park, with my four-year-old son, a ranger, and about a dozen other people. We stepped gingerly over a shallow rivulet of water. Only the kid noticed that this stream was issuing from a hole that came right out of the base of a tree! “Why is that water coming out of the tree?” he asked. Not one other person there had even seen it.
When young John Muir, the Sierra Club founder, went to dig a well on his father’s Wisconsin homestead, he reached a depth of more than forty feet at evening. Next morning, his father let him down in a bucket to dig some more. In the cold, still night, the heavier carbon dioxide had sunk to the bottom of the hole. It was all the boy could do to cling to the rope while his father pulled him out of the poisoned air.
When on a winter afternoon my son and I checked a cut bank where we go to watch the soil in rural New Jersey, we found that it was shot through with sheaves of frozen threads of water. The pattern of percolation was perfectly preserved. We could detach big hunks of these, blow out the cold loam from among them, and hold in our hands harps of shining water. (That was when what I’d read in a soil book came home to me: that Earth is the only planet in the solar system where water exists in all three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.)
Danger and delight are found together in holes. The first thing you learn in digging is that holes try to undig themselves. Sand slides down around the shovel or your ankles; clods and pebbles rattle down the hole’s slope; when a mine ceiling is saturated with water, it becomes heavy enough to collapse. That’s the knot of fear: to be buried alive. The staple diet of smalltown newspapers is of daring rescues from caved-in holes. Or like the toad that we kids found stuck in the hexagonal cracks of a dried pond bed. It had gone to sleep in sweet mud and wakened in a closed trap.
But we sought out these dangers, just the way we climbed ropes so high that our organs began to tremble, or swayed in lookouts at the top of a pine where the trunk was not much thicker than our very breakable young necks.
One week, the best fort was an abandoned foundation hole in the oak scrub of a vacant lot. Vines had grown in around it. Bigger kids had pulled big slabs of plywood over for a roof, concealing them under a thick layer of yellow dirt.
No one would ever find us here!
—But what if the big kids come back?
And we made rules, named a club, elected officers, and swore we’d tell no one about this secret hole-fort that smelled of acid and mold.
Then, someone told. The parents notified the town that they had discovered a hazard. End of hole.
It is too bad when people outgrow the love of holes. Sometimes, it happens because the hole has become the symbol of degrading work, of ditchdigging. Or perhaps it is too near a reminder of just how back-breaking work can be. To dig a hole is a glorious thing, and once you are into the rhythm of it, it can be hard to stop. Nevertheless, few adults would start to dig one unless they were told to.
Roughnecks on oil rigs all know, or once knew, the old chant that goes, in part:
“Now gather round, boys, and it’s into the ground.
We said, No way, man, we’re going to town.
Down on Fourth Street, drinking that wine,
Seeing them whores, what a hell of a time!”
Adam himself did not dig a hole, until the Lord told him to.
But now we have exorcised holes, just as we have exorcised death. Both have become a technical matter, a question of pushing the right buttons. Recently, I saw a folding coffin catafalque on silent wheels. Pop it open, drop the box on, and roll the thing away. When the coffin is gone the catafalque folds up as small as a stroller. Leave a professional to fill up the hole.
—Dead? No, nobody dead around here.
Once, holes were sacred. The Hopi, indeed, conceived of themselves as having emerged from a hole, from the place they had been living as the guests of the ants. (The ants, like Saint Phocas, were good hosts. They fed their guests and tightened their own belts until their waists were as thin as a blade of grass.) All the Pueblo peoples and the Anasazi before them went down into mud-chamber kivas for their initiations and spring ceremonials. The pregnant mothers of West Africa dig out the mounds of termites to feed on the calcium-rich earth that the insects have brought up for them.
Nor is the Western tradition without its love of holes. The hill of the Acropolis is honeycombed with shrines and grottoes. All over Europe, the Madonnas have been worshiped in caves and crypts. At St.-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence, the crypt of the church is purported to hold the real skull of Mary Magdalene. You have to go down two flights of steps. At the bottom, it smells of piss and wet earth. But to this day, couples come here to scratch graffiti on the walls. Almost always, the graffito is an archway, representing the door to a cave, with a number scratched beside it. The inscription serves as a prayer that tells how many children the couple wants to have.
Most of us ignore holes, or fear them. When there was such a thing as a root cellar, you could at least smell and feel that cold, damp, secret place. Gardeners still sometimes know this love of holes. (How many of you would keep gardening if it were all hydroponics?) For the rest of us, practically the only hole we see outside the bathroom is the refrigerator. There is no denying that it is a very clean and useful hole, but I suspect that refrigerator light is the sort that they have in hell.