The hole in the woods

During the summer after high school, after Sara and I parted, I began to dig a hole in the woods. I took a spade from the garage and made my way across the back lawn, trudged through a small patch of marsh behind our pool, and climbed into the woods. There was a huge white pine back about 200 yards. It was a hydra of a tree, with a single enormous trunk and three smaller, but substantial, necks that rose up about 200 ft. From the back deck you could see this monster rising alone, liberated from the canopy. I started digging at the base of this tree.

The forest floor was covered in a amber pad of pine needles. The Maine woods always smelled so sweet. I positioned the spade and rested a foot on the collar, gripping the old wood handle. Slowy, deliberately I pushed down with my foot and watched the needles pitch up on end and follow the advancing spade into the dark earth; a hundred long doomed ships. Pulling back on the handle, I raised a pyramid of solid black soil, full of unruly roots and twigs jutting from its sides, and tossed it to the side. I repeated this, all the time thinking. There was an desperate urgency in the pace I dug at and in the act itself. I dug as if there was a goal, a purpose, a point at which I could stop and say "I've done it. I'm done". I dug until I was sore, until my eyes were level with the forest floor. I unearthed roots as thick as my arms. The network of them twisted about me, hanging up my shovel and frustrating me. I dug until it began to rain and thunder cracked around me. I stopped and crouched, my back resting on the earthy wall of my hole. The hydra loomed above me, watching me with knots that appeared to be curious eyes, in the low gray light of that stormy afternoon.

Why did I do this? When I am faced with the reality of my failures I attempt to mask it and patch it with a spurt of glorious accomplishment. In the oppressive rural setting I was in, this was the best "accomplishment" I could think of. A hole; movement of earth; making a scar on in the floor. I was not destructive, nor was it constructive, it was simply an expenditure of energy that had been long-stored in my constant failure. The crumbling relationship with a girl I loved (my first love), the absolute squandering of my time in high school, all this would have required energy to maintain and make right. But that was over now. The chance to release my energy in a constructive and controlled manner was gone. Now the only thing I could do was dig a hole. Convert my regret and do something futile.