An Essay on Digging Holes
by Sasha
I come from a family of engineers. Besides my own father, all the older men in my life, every potential father figure, was an engineer. A few tried to be something else, but they always came back to the vocation. My grandfather, my uncle, my great-grandfather— all engineers. As I grew up it was these men whose careers I should emulate.
The engineers in my family are, for the most part, civil. This is not a remark on their manners but rather a description of their line of work. Civil engineers do lots of things, but in layman's terms, they dig holes. I have a history of hole-digging father figures, American engineers, good men.
I was raised with stories of my mother and uncle taking after their engineer father by digging paths through the sand and letting water form streams, model rivers. A proud image to me, I always assumed that land was shifted around, that people shifted it around, that people could and should change the earth, dig a hole. Digging holes became synonymous with a secure career. My uncle grew up from playing around in the sand and went to college to become an engineer himself. Now, he digs tunnels beneath the city and makes sure pipes and water lines are running smoothly. Once, I shadowed him for a day and walked a mile underneath Seattle, through the tunnel drilled to make a path northward for the link train. It is strange how normal it felt.
My family has chosen to work maintenance, to keep the dams and tunnels from crumbling. They know how every hole dug in this earth has damaged it and those living on the surface. The family bible is a book called Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner (we each have a copy) and it tells the story of a North America twisting itself apart for the colonialist pursuit of taming waterways, by digging holes and making dams.
* * *
Imagine a vacant lot. The one I am imagining is in my hometown, near the record store. There is a teenager in the lot with a tree branch. The teen begins to shift concrete chunks aside, find earth, dig in with the stick. They prod their way into the soil. Across the street, a pale young woman emerges from the record store with a shopping bag on one shoulder and her infant on the other. The infant is sunburned, wearing a little baby t-shirt which parodies a label on a supermarket vegetable. "Organic, one hundred percent locally grown!" it proclaims. The woman stares at the trespassing teen. Before long, the owner of the property next door has seen the teen and called the cops on them. The teenager leaves.
As a child, they were told by their friends that if they dug deep enough they would come through on the other side. At what point would someone notice wherever they emerged, and police would be called to come pull a dirt-covered teen out of the upturned soil? At what point is it okay to dig a hole in a neighbor's vacant lot, and how many college degrees does that take? At what point can a soil be dug up to accommodate an infant's growth when the climate is clearly unfit for them? At what point can a white baby in America be "locally grown"?
* * *
I reminisce on this vacant lot when I think about my hometown now, as I am away at college, the same that my uncle went to, and my grandfather. The last time I drove past the lot it was all torn up, a basement-level pit, being developed into a new building for the expanding downtown. I have not been back in a number of months, and I wonder what it is like now.
I tried to be an engineer but I did not have the hands for it. I guess it adds up, since I never spent my childhood digging little rivers and damming them up just to watch the land. I was focused on stories. I would draw maps and make up names and places and they would always be of homes tucked away, small, almost a part of the earth. And when I was a teen, I did not stop in that vacant lot and dig; that wasn't me. I stopped there and wrote until I had no ideas left in me, and then I stared at little plants growing up through the concrete and asked them for more, but they only told me there are many ways in which I can't be like the good American men in my family.
This is an apology but it is not an excuse. It is my letter to the land and whoever's listening. I'm sorry for my presumption, that I thought to use this soil, to shape it to myself. My family and I, we all read the same book, we all know the same truths. They chose to mitigate damage. I am choosing to crawl out of this hole that was dug for me, shaped like a Good American Man. I don't know if it is any better of a decision, to walk away rather than hold things together, but I hope something good will fill the space I left behind.