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March 25th 2007 Just last night, in a heroic last minute attempt, Steve secured permission behind an 1862 place in Northside. We met at 9 am and headed around back. The lot was on the large side for a city yard, and there was a garage, and a concrete patio on the back property line. We located some ash and brick at 3 feet deep on the open side property line, and cut out a couple of test holes. These petered out at just past 3 feet deep and the only glass looked like it was from a crown top pop bottle. We discussed our options. Steve decided to go up the road a block or two to ask permission at a place that dated to 1834 on the county Auditors web site. I watched him work his relentless pitch on the front porch, turning the "no" into a "maybe", and then after a bit more, a yes. We walked around back to find a fairly normal sized city lot. This house was the first on the block, and probably the first for MANY blocks. The yard was now fenced, and nothing could be located within it's borders. Behind the fence was now the property of the next house over. In this yard was a curious depression. Steve said he would have to get in contact with that person to see if we could check out their yard also. About this time, my cell phone rang. The call was from Rob Davis, who just happened to be about a half mile away, opening up a stone liner behind a big 1870's place. I informed him of our skunking, and he invited us over to help out with what they had going on. He said his gang was not convinced they were into a pit or not. A few minutes later we pulled up and saw them flinging dirt into the air from the back yard. I greeted Rob and he introduced us to the rest of his buds. Chuck, who he has dug with before, and Jason, and Jake. I learned that Jake had secured this permission. The homeowner was a lady he knew from way back, but not very well. He told us that when he called her to ask for permission, she informed him that his Dad was there awhile ago metal detecting. The homeowner did not appear to be at home, and nothing else was mentioned about her. We set to work. They were about three feet deep and had one stone wall showing. I could tell by the look of the dirt coming out at 3 feet that they were indeed into something, and the stone wall was a major clue as well. This was Jake and Jason's first ever privy dig, and I could tell at this point they were wondering if anything was really going to materialize from the giant hole they were now digging. The only sign was a privyish looking fill, and a few small food bones. Plenty of sign for the digger who has dug before, but not much in the way of a prize for those who have not. I suggested we follow the wall around to get a better idea of what it was for sure, and the size of it. Steve, Mike, and I took turns in the pit, opening it up for a better look. Rob, Jason, Chuck, and Jake also took turns. With a fresh man always at the ready, it didn't take long to get down to 5 or 6 feet, and to get all 4 of the walls exposed. On my second turn in the pit, the tip of my shovel flipped up solid seeds along one of the walls, and just under this level glass started spilling out. I decided to level off the pit just above the glass layer and then hop out and let someone else crack into the goodies. One of the first intact bottles out was a quart sized amber blob top Christian Morlien beer. This was passed around and ogled mightily. The use layer was thick, starting at around 6 feet deep. We could not with any good feelings probe to see how deep the pit was, as there was just too much glass, and no one wanted to chance breaking anything good. Down we went. Below left to right, Jake, Mike, and Chuck.
The changing of shifts was fast paced with so many diggers wanting to get their hands into the glassy layer. The seeds were thick and were nice and light, making fluffing and finding easy as a summer breeze. Steve was in the pit when he cornered a nest of round, solid sounding objects with his plastic scratcher. In a moment he started handing up one squat soda after another. They were smooth base, matching the age of the other items being found, but after having went for so long without the squatty shape making an appearance, I was delighted. The first three sodas were found by Steve in the corner, and were;
Looking up from within the pit, the diggers field of view was an opening with 6 heads peering in from every side, eyes wide with excitement and wonder, and mouths oohing and ahhing with each new addition to the keeper pile. The treasures were popping out on a regular basis now. Broken ironstone by the bucket load was hauled out, and the crashing sound coming from the pile bounced back off the rear of the house.
7 men were being boys again, and digging a big dirty hole full of treasures. Aside from the treasure being found by the handful, boyhood and deeply male inner awakenings must have occurred to the other diggers beside myself. Because when 7 guys get together, the male hunting party and clubhouse gang mentality that hides in our very genes begins to rattle. Every boy, that was really ever a boy, has dug himself, at least once in his life, an underground clubhouse. This was usually topped by a bowed piece of old gray plywood with some dirt thrown on top of it. Consider this the part where, if this were on film, the diggers would look up at each other, not finding their adult selves, but their 10 year old boy selves. Each new boy chimed in while playing the "identification game" that goes hand in hand with privy digging. "That's a piece of a dolls head, see the hair". "Hey a toothbrush, cool" ! "What is THIS" ? "Oh that's a broken toothpaste pot-lid, fancy, aint it".
They were in a paleo-age share the meat mental state. The women were back in the cave cleaning things and feeding babies, and the manboy was out doing his killing, and sharing the harvest.
The pit was ten feet deep or so, and after 4 feet of solid seedy glass and many cool items found, the diggers were rapt and completely enthralled. No more than a few minutes would pass before another prize was added to the pile, and sometimes, several things all in the same minute. The seeds seemed to come to an end and a gray ashy layer, void of glass for the most part, started showing on the floor of the pit. On mike's turn, he decided to mole a little, and found after a few inches another seedy glassy layer was waiting. This bottom layer was the same as the one above, loaded with glass, and another 2 feet thick.
Below, me in the pit.
Just as the actual bottom was reached, cleaned out, and the last man yanked from the hole, a car pulled into the yard and drove directly towards us through the grass. Backs straightened and whispers containing the word homeowner were heard on the air. We looked briefly at each other and then most eyes wound up on Jake, as it was his permission. The station wagon lurched to an abrupt stop just feet away from the hole and from the drivers side window a voice issued forth in a tone that stood the hair up on the back of 7 necks, "NOTHING WILL BE REMOVED FROM THIS YARD" !!! A black cloud of woe and dread spread outward from the car in a thick, all encompassing wave that blew back hair and caused tittering shards to fall from their perch atop the dirt pile. I had not considered the gravity of the fact that it was not me or my partners who had obtained this permission, and I realized, certainly too late, that I was not sure of, nor had any clues to, the arrangement made between Jake and the homeowner for permission to dig here. I was Johnny come lately, and I assumed this was as legitimate as I wanted it to be. The bottles, all of them, were in her very plain line of sight, next to a big tree stump off to the side of the hole. All of us are more than OK with splitting up the finds, as is customary for homeowner compensation, but it was appearing that the homeowner had a different take on things. As she was getting out of her car and stepping over the recently deceased cat, Rob slinked like a serpent over to the bottle pile and put a few bottles into a 5 gallon bucket. The lady homeowner was making comments now that seemed riddled with nonsensical words and pieces of words while she made her way past the chain link fence into the area of the dig. "None of that broken glass goes back into the hole" she announced. "And I want to keep out all the bricks too, even the broken ones". Rob came away from the bucket of bottles and I casually moseyed over to it and started putting bottles in. I got about 2/3rds of the embossed things inside and then turned toward the lady who was coming over in my direction. She wore no smile, yet did not really frown. She looked reasonable enough, wearing a white hospital smock and slacks. She was talking to the other guys, and I heard only snippets of what she said. I heard she had killed her cats, but did not want them thrown into the big empty hole. She wanted them right where they were, in the yard. She mentioned that the other bones were from other cats. She then asked what we were doing and why. Some tried to answer, while I tried to look like the tree I was standing next to. As it turns out, she was calm about things after that, and that in itself helped immensely. She told us she had dug out her cistern awhile back and found allot of broken glass that she kept in boxes, and some whole bottles too. "Would one of you like to go look at the cistern with me", she inquired. There were no takers. "Would one of you like to come into the cellar and see my bottles", she asked. Again, nobody volunteered. "I need that ladder that the painter left taken down from my house", she said. I started in motion over to the back of the house to get the ladder, and Jason came along and walked it down while I footed it. It was a 40 footer and was stout and heavy, and was a nice aluminum class 1-a ladder. I wonder why the painter would suddenly run off without his 300 dollar ladder ? Once back near the pit, I heard her say that all the glass must be hand picked from the dirt pile and piled. A couple guys started doing that while some of us started filling in the hole. She walked over into the garage for a moment and a hushed and hurried conversation broke out. Jake said he did indeed have permission and said he explained the deal to her. He said it should be OK but it wasn't a bad idea to go ahead with dividing up the bottles, and to make sure to leave her plenty as she liked old bottles. That sounded like a plan, and a much fairer one than "NOTHING GETS REMOVED FROM THIS YARD". She walked back over to the hole and caught me throwing broken bricks in. "What did I tell you about the bricks" ? she said. "Oh sorry did you mean even the little chunks of broken bricks too" ? I asked. "Yes, all of them", she said. "All of the broken glass too". Well, that would have been a feat, as there were hundreds and hundreds of broken bricks and shards of glass, mingled throughout most of the dirt pile. The pit was 12 feet deep and we hit glass at 6 feet, so the dirt was riddled with bricks and glass. Basically, she could only face one direction at any single time, so whoever was behind her chucked glass and brick filled dirt into the pit. Occasionally a piece of glass would make a clashing as it was being shoveled into the pit and she would turn around, receive a prompt and apparently heartfelt, "Sorrrrrrryyyyy", and then it would resume again. Later, she caught me tossing a Gatorade bottle in, (to which I had received no instructions for), and she made me go into the pit and get it back out and place it with any other plastic I could locate. When we were finished, it was amazing, the amount of bricks and broken glass that had been separated from the dirt. She looked at the two piles of broken glass and broken bricks and seemed pleased. During this, two buckets of bottles had been carried to the truck. She asked if I was sure I did not want to go look at the big scary empty brick cistern with her, or maybe to come down into the cellar with her to look at the bottles she had. Her inflection and tone was so bizarre, that although I told myself everything would probably have been fine, I could not get past the point of feeling like I would have been walking near sheer cliffs in a thick fog. Among the other diggers, Scooby-Doo trap doors and baskets with lotion containers being passed down into a deep dark hole was discussed, with a joking smile, but with serious eyes. It was near the end of things I learned she was a nurse in the psych ward. I have visited psych wards, and it's hard to keep any kind of wall up no matter how sane you are when you enter. Unless you are both deaf and blind, some of it will stick, and will shout out between rational thoughts long after departing. She walked over to the pile of whole bottles and said, "Do you guys want some of these". There were many keepers in the pile still, that didn't make it into the buckets, and although a couple more bottles might have been picked up by a nearby digger, most of them were left. None of us were interested in trying to take any part besides our fair share, so we told her they were hers, and that we took a few. I waited on borrowed breath for her to tell us to return them, but she just said OK, and that was that. At the very end, she was seen with the corners of her mouth curling up, and she told us we were "kind of nuts", and that we were "real characters". Right back at ya lady. We met in a parking lot a block away to split up the finds, and everyone got something they liked. It got scary and very weird there for a while, but we survived with our skins intact and a greater appreciation for everything. Jake and Chuck and Rob and Jason were really fun to dig with. Between Chuck impersonating the homeowner and using her now infamous lines, and Jason's "Whitney Houston" cell phone ring tone, that never stopped until it was etched into my mind for the rest of the day, I was laughing almost constantly. Thanks to all those guys for inviting 3 more amigos to a dig that could have been finished easily by themselves. It was a great dig and a great day and one I shall not soon forget, regardless of how hard I may try.
The end.
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