The Borrow Pit

Harold just forgot his name, he won’t be remembering it any time soon. He remembers remembering his name, and for the most part he remembers who he was, but he does not know his name any more, Harold is suddenly gone from his mind. He remembered that he was old, and that him becoming old required a long and tiring journey. He remembered having kids, running around the farm, and how he worried about them all day, but he wasn’t worried now. Perhaps they had grown up. The echo of their play remained, their noisy lively play. It was once as clear as the radio, tuned perfectly to a nearby station. Over the years, it seems the radio was turned down, or off altogether, or perhaps it had stopped broadcasting, moved out of range, and he had refused to get a better antenna or find a new station, and now he sat here, listening for the children in between the steady roars of the passing cars. 

Here on the back porch, it felt like he had always been at this house, always a part of it, he was just as much a decoration as the portraits on the wall, the table in the dining room, the couch. Had he ever left this farm? Had he ever left this porch? He isn't sure anymore. He remembers this farm’s entire life in terms of his own. He remembers being born here, he remembers how it grew and changed over time, additions to the first floor, then the second. The insulation, originally concrete. The addition of outlets in walls, more over the years as more technology was in need of it.  He remembers when it was all cornfields, for miles. Now, just the few that surround him; at their edges, he can see encroaching suburbs; south of him, the interstate.

The interstate. It cut right across the fields. He had one square of the great grid left between him and it. It used to be that he sat outside to enjoy the quiet, the great emptiness of the endless flat plains of the Midwest. He would sit there and watch the shadows of the clouds pass over the empty endlessness with casual ease and onward into the abyss. He would sit out there and wonder where the nothingness ended, somewhere beyond his horizon, in Canada or Mexico or the Rockies. But the interstate was loud. A constant droning noise drained his focus on the horizon, calling to him like a siren’s song.  Before long, he was catching himself watching the cars going along, more than the fields or the birds in the fields or the corn in the fields. Eventually he dropped all pretense, and sat out there every day with the intent of watching the interstate.

There were other roads around. Roads that he drove as a kid, country roads. Back trails, paths dividing fields, roads he likely had a deeper and more concrete connection to, but this road was his road. He remembers building the interstate, it was just a good job to do while the construction was passing through. Just a handful of weeks in the hot sun with pavement and machinery and the dark soil beneath his feet, being turned over, moved, buried under liquid rock, where he knew it would likely never escape. And now he sat here, watching that road, and that overpass, every single day. It helped that nobody had rented out the fields the past couple years, as they remained empty and never obstructed his view. He watched drivers and passengers drive past. North and south and down the ramp and east and west. Pulling over to the side of the road for some reason or another. Once, he witnessed an accident, two cars colliding and spinning out of control. Everyone was fine, he watched as all the specks that were people got out of their crumpled smoking vehicles, and then when all the sirens came they didn’t take anyone away, but it was the most exciting moment he had had in a long time. Some days, it would rain, and he would stand at the window instead of sit on the porch. He would sip coffee or some of Beth’s Tea, and watch the rain fall on his home and the fields and the interstate, watch the rooster tails of mist and droplets, a simple vague grey shape from where he sat. Sometimes he would think about who they were, what they did, and where they were going, but most of the time he did his best to not think. Those days were behind him. His mind is no longer the busy and intricate machinery that made his world, it was no longer as vibrant and lively as that overpass, which sometimes had so many cars on it that they all slowed down to a crawl and left him thinking “if you all just drove fast despite how close you’ve gotten, you’d get where you were going.” He would watch this, and then the sun would set and the shadows of the cars would stretch so far behind each one that they became snakes, and then he would watch just the lights as they sped back and forth along a black and empty horizon under the fading stars. Then he would go inside and eat a simple meal, a frozen pizza or rice and beans or a microwaved meal for one, he would eat it in the kitchen, watching Beth’s little television, then feed her two goldfish, then sleep until the hum of the interstate awoke him. 

Perhaps this is all his life has ever been. But perhaps it wasn't. Harold remembered leaving, once. Harold remembered his father, pissed beyond words that he wasn't going to help him work the fields that summer. Harold was glad to get out of working the field, but Harold was afraid he'd lose his Dad. Harold remembers a long plane ride, musty used book stores in London, taking a motorbike down hairpin turns on a mountainside. Writing “Harold Was Here” in chalk on a brick wall. A woman with a French accent. Harold remembers this but, he, the man watching the interstate, wasn't so sure it ever even happened.

It was in this ambiguous purgatorial meditative state that he remembered the borrow pit. He dug it with a few other guys, with only hand tools. He remembers the soil as it flung over his shoulder and onto the pile they would later use to shape the off ramp leading out of town. He remembers feeling like he was a part of something larger back then. His team of men dug the borrow pit which built the interstate which helped the town which helped his country. He was a mechanism of each of these things and it’s smooth operation, in some small way, hinged on his participation. He hadn’t felt that way in a long time.

The next thing he knew he was digging. He had the old shovel, the one he kept in the garage, encrusted with old dirt and dented and not as sharp as it once was. The oil from his hands, imbedded in the splintering wood handle. The soil was already flung over his shoulder and the blade of the shovel was already digging back in for another bite. It occurred to him that he had approached this grand nothingness and began digging without hesitation. He stood before something voluminous, infinite when compared to himself, and he had taken it on without a second thought. He decided to keep digging. It was satisfying and it wasn’t the interstate. When the sun set he had a good sized pile of soil and a small box shaped pit in his backyard. When he microwaved his single serving Pot Pie and watched the evening news, he felt tired, and he felt proud of his day’s work. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t lay awake at night waiting for sleep, struggling to remember the day he just had, he only closed his eyes and drifted off to elsewhere.

The next morning he was sore. His back hurt and his arms hurt and he had a hurt in him that extended beyond his body, past the tips of his fingers. When he saw the pit, he couldn’t say what it was for, but it felt important to him. He had to finish the pit. When he had the shovel in his hand again, enough pain melted away that he could resume digging. He worked again that day for hours, it was hard and sweaty and menial and he felt distracted, which was good. Time again resumed for him. It was like passing through a tunnel under a mountain or a large body of water, emerging on the other side and realizing how much distance has been travelled in the darkness. The pile behind him grew larger and larger and he at times wondered what he would do with it, maybe sell it, or he could build a good sized hill for sledding. He remembers taking his kids to an overpass near their house, the only hill for miles it seemed. It had just snowed and there was no school and he was there with his brother, and their kids were playing together in the snow, riding down that hill, screaming. It was loud but the cars racing down the overpass behind him were louder and he remembers saying to his brother that it would be great if there were an actual hill around here for the kids to play on, and his brother saying “You think just because someone put all this dirt here on purpose, you think it’s not a real hill?”

Whatever had happened to his brother and his kids, and his brother’s kids? He wasn’t sure.

It was then that he noticed a woman approaching. She was large, with an endearing smile, clearly very happy to see him. She had a couple bags of groceries, and asked for his help, and he did. He didn’t want to put down the shovel, and he made sure to make that known, but he helped her. After they put some meals in the freezer and some beers in the fridge, she chatted with him pleasantly, asking about his life, how he’s been, what he’s been up to. He told her he was working away but he didn’t say what on because he wasn’t sure how to quantify it to her. he wasn’t sure how he knew her but he knew he was glad to see her and that was enough for him to trust her, plus there was the groceries. When she asked if he had “taken his pills” he felt confused again, what pills was she talking about? Then she held him down and sat on his chest and forced a couple of little white pills down his throat, and held his eyes open and put drops in them. She was saying sorry the whole time but he still trusted her less, and no longer found her smile endearing. Still sitting on his chest she asks about the hole, and he pretends to play dumb, then she says “what’s going on with the hole, dad?” And the name threw him for a loop. Dad. He tells her he’s just tired of watching the interstate or watching Beth’s TV, and she asks if he’s working himself too hard, and he lies and says no.

She sits with him and watches him dig for the rest of the day. He offers her a shovel but she says her knees can’t take it, and he goes back to doing it by himself. After a long enough silence he starts telling her about Europe. Harold tells her about reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea and Kafka’s Metamorphosis while living in London, and how both made him feel like all the work meant nothing, but he didn’t feel that way now. When he decided to turn in for the day she said she had to go home to her family, and he nodded, and she said she might bring her daughter next time.

That night he found sleep quickly and did not dream.

The next day, he gets up at dawn with some instant coffee. He ignores the creaking in his bones and digs for several hours. The pit is becoming a grand rectangle in his yard, ever deeper the closer to the center he goes. He spends the day digging a circle around his last edge, then digging one layer deeper each row in. The organization of the labor makes the borrow pit into a stepped chasm growing ever deeper, a wound on the earth he has no intention to heal. When he goes in for lunch, he realizes that large woman is back, she has that endearing smile, a child in tow, it has that same endearing smile, they are in the kitchen. The child is drawing Beth’s goldfish at the dinner table. He just wants to dig, but now there are guests, including this mystery child that for some reason he doesn’t totally trust. He placates them for a while, but he wants to work again. The large woman, who he suspects might have once been his daughter, asks him about Europe. “You should tell her one of your stories,” she says. Harold remembers riding on the back of a beautiful woman’s motorcycle, cutting through the narrow streets of Paris. Harold remembers hairpin turns back and forth down a mountain. The face was too steep for any other kind of road, and so they took the longest possible path down. Back and forth, all the way to the bottom. Instead of telling her this story, he lashes out. He doesn’t know why these thoughts of Europe upset him so much, but he has to dig now.

He tries to bury himself in his work but the large woman with the nice smile who may have once been his daughter is crying and yelling at him and begging him to stop. “You’re going to kill yourself working like this,” She says. “I can’t keep taking care of you, I have a family to worry about,” she says. “Say goodbye to your granddaughter,” she says. His heart fills up, but he barely looks at them, he just keeps digging. They are headed to the car, and he can see the anger in their gait, and he asks them if they want a shovel. Before the little girl can say yes her mom says no, forcefully, possibly fairly. Before she leaves, she throws a sack of potatoes at him, saying only “This should last you,” before peeling off, a rooster tail of dusty gravel driveway shooting up behind her. He spends the rest of the day digging, trying to decide what to do with all this dirt. Maybe he’ll build a big castle out of sod bricks for that little girl, if he ever sees her again.

He keeps digging the next day, nobody visits and he is glad. He thinks about possibly selling all this dirt. How much does dirt go for these days, anyway?

Soon, the rainy season starts, and he tries to dig in the rain. As it falls, the rain makes the soil clumsier, then soupy, and a bucket would be a more efficient digging tool than this shovel, which all the mud runs off of whenever he tries to lift. On his lunch break he realizes he's been soaked for hours, and feels cold. He decides to stay in for the rest of the day.

It rains again the next day and he is still inexorably cold, so he stays in and drinks instant coffee all day and eats nothing, watching the rain fall over the interstate. He hates the interstate now. It seems so much louder than it was before. He notices the borrow pit has a growing puddle at the deepest point.

He’s trying to remember what happened to the last borrow pit. He watches Beth’s fish swim in the bowl and one of the last things she told him echoes in his head. Goldfish grow to fit the bowl they are in. The more room, the bigger the goldfish. Was there a cap on the size of goldfish, or could they, in an infinite ocean, grow infinitely?

One day, the rain stops, and he looks outside and he sees the borrow pit has filled with water. He feels weak, but he picks up Beth’s fish. He takes them out with him. Harold dumps the fish into the Borrow pit, so they can swim around for awhile in something less confined. He climbs to the top of his pile of dirt, to watch them dart around the murky waters. From up here Harold can see the Borrow pit he first dug all those years ago. Trees have grown up all around it strong and full of leaves. It too is filled with water. A boy and his father sit beside it, fishing by the looks of it. Harold imagines the water in his pit someday surrounded by lush trees and filled with the most wonderful goldfish, and perhaps someone will come here to fish, and that someone will exist here because he existed here, and couldn’t have without Harold. As he falls asleep, there atop his mound, Harold wonders to himself why they even call them borrow pits. Nobody intended to return the soil to begin with.