Digging Holes
Do kids still dig holes or is it a lost art? When I was growing up we dug holes all the time. Some had a purpose but many were dug just for the fun of digging in dirt.
I grew up in Dearing, Georgia on Iron Hill Road and it was named that for a reason. The red clay made the ground look like rusted iron, and it was about that hard. Digging holes was not easy.
We still dug holes for everything from traps to trying to dig to China. Back then we actually thought we could dig all the way through to the other side of the earth, and adults encouraged that belief with a grin.
Our holes usually got a couple of feet deep before we gave up. The ground was just too hard. And on our farm, it was full of rocks. But we never gave up starting a new hole when the notion struck us.
Our traps never worked, either. Reading about pit traps made it seem easy to dig a hole, cover it with small limbs and leaves, and catch dinner. We dreamed of catching rabbits, possums and raccoons, but never got one. I realize now our small shallow holes would have been easy for a critter to climb out and we never thought of putting Punji sticks in the bottom.
Wouldn’t have really mattered, anyway, since I don’t remember ever seeing one of our traps where something has actually broken through the cover. Maybe it was because we dug them where the digging was easy, not on some kind of game trail.
My grandmother and an aunt lived in Ocala, Florida and I looked forward to our twice-annual trips there. The soft sand in her back yard was really easy to dig holes. We dug them on every trip at Christmas and during summer vacation.
It took no time to dig a hole deeper than we were tall. But that created a problem. It is really hard to get dirt out of a hole deeper than you stand. That made us give up a little bit before we got to China.
My Uncle Roger lived on a farm near Thomson and Uncle Adron lived about a mile away. Roger, Jr. who we called Dunnie, and Adron’s son Bobby were a few years older than me. On Uncle Roger’s farm out in a field were two huge boulders side by side, touching each other.
Those boulders stood about eight feet high off the ground. Bobby and Dunnie were convinced they marked buried treasure or some kind of Indian burial place. They spend many hours digging around them. On some trips I helped.
We tried digging under them from the side. I guess we never considered the danger of one rolling a little and crushing us, like we never thought about the holes in Florida caving in on us. And we never found the treasure!
We dug a lot on Dearing Branch, too, but most of that digging was trying to build a dam on it. We would dig sand off the edges and bottom of a big pool, making it deeper and bigger as we dug, and filling croaker sacks with the sand for the dam.
One summer we actually go the pool deep enough for the water to come up to our necks – when we kneeled on the bottom. It never got deep enough to swim and every winter the rains filled the branch and sand washed in and filled in our efforts. And the rushing branch washed away our dam. But that just gave us something to do the next summer.
It is kind of funny, but when daddy made me dig holes for a purpose, like setting fence posts, I hated it. I liked using post hold diggers but not for a purpose. And we had to put up posts to repair fences every summer on the farm.
And digging a drainage ditch was somehow different from digging for fun. We often had to work on the shallow ditches around the chicken houses to drain the water away from them, and the only good thing about digging them were the earthworms we uncovered. At least we could collect them and go fishing!
I still dig holes sometimes, but always with a purpose. Post holes and drainage ditches mostly now days and they are still not a lot of fun. But I guess my aches and pains keep me from wanting to just dig for fun, anyway.
Encourage your kids to dig holes but safely. It will get them out of the house, keep them out of trouble and keep them fit. And they may have as much fun as we did.