The re-surfacing of trapped Chilean miners has set an upbeat tone for underground adventure this week.
Yesterday, tim described his childhood escapade using storm sewers to go to the store for cigarettes. Need I say it? Kids, don’t try this, really. Flash flooding and lung cancer are the very first things that come to my risk-averse mind, followed closely by enormous spiders and sudden earthquakes. Here’s an excerpt:
it was winter out so the underground route was warm (good news) but we all had our winter coats and boots so we were kind of klunky . the master map charter got messed up and we had to double back a couple times. in a few places the drain pipe got small and we had to take off jackets and shinney through. in other places the pipe was short and instead of walking a little hunched over you had to go for long distances with kness bent doing the duck walk and scraping your back on the concrete pipe above.
A vivid account of a bit of scary risk-taking, tim. But it does remind me that some people seem to enjoy navigating tight underground spaces. A family trip to Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park ten years ago opened my eyes to the caver culture. The area is shot through with subterranean passages, and on a tour of one less-than-mammoth cave a young guide described how she and her friends still spent their after hours squeezing through uncharted tunnels, just for the fun of it. Not for me, thanks.
If I’m going to go underground at all, it has to be with a jumpsuit, a hardhat and 10 billion dollars worth of burrowing and air handling equipment so I can stand tall, stay clean, and completely obliterate all icky worms and any other obstacles that might block my way.
That’s how they do it in Switzerland.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel will be the longest railway tunnel in the world when it is completed, 35.5 miles from end to end. The Swiss have been working on this one for 20 years – imagine having the political will to continue on such an expensive project for two decades! Given the same task, I’m afraid we would have abandoned it for political reasons at the first change of administrations. On Friday the Swiss had a long-awaited breakthrough.
Staged for the media? Of course. But if you’re going to spend that much time and money burrowing, shouldn’t there be someone there to marvel and applaud when you get to the end?
“Hey Ma! See what I did!”
“Nice, honey. But look at all the mud on your pants!”
What is the most impressive thing you’ve ever done with a shovel?
Trail Baboon 
i’ve never done anything impressive with a shovel – especially a long tunnel or anything that takes a long attention span. gosh. 20 years just digging. uffda. i like to dig potatoes – does that count? and i’m digging a nice bed for the garlic planting (needs to be done soon).
but i just gotta say – Saint Barbara? no wonder there are so many mining accidents! geesh. get a real saint.
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It’s not surprising that, as a modest midwesterner, you would downplay Saint Barbara, Barb. A quick online check revealed that she is not only the patron saint of miners, but of artillerymen and military engineers, and anyone who works with explosives. In my opinion, such people will always have need of a patron saint, whether or not they are Catholic, or even religious.
This account of the life of Saint Barbara, describing her decision to change her father’s design for the bath-house by insisting that the builders install three windows rather than the two called for in the original plan, make me wonder why she is not also the patron saint of remodelers, interior decorators and all those upbeat, can-do program hosts on HGTV.
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well, fine – but i think “Crazy Harry” would be a better patron saint for those people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Harry
St. Barb may have preferred differently, but i hate loud noises.
it’s enough to put up with the loud bleating coming from Lassi today, who is in the noisiest heat i have ever experienced in a doe. is there a patron saint of goats?
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saint heidi?
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I like that.
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Ooh, I’ll read all that later, thanks for the links, Dale. I’m going to call her St. Babs.
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I do hope they called and had their utility lines marked before starting this project.
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ha!
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i am frustrated on this saturday morning. i have just spent the last hour and a half making a wonderful breakfast potato dish and typing a long entry for todays blog when the battery died on the laptop. ( i thought i had it plugged in) the response was lost in the vapors. i get to do a rewrite now.
dale can you find some kind of autosaver for this thing like you get with word and gmails emails. if you lose it it si still there in an saved file. most of the crew is smart enough to do this on word and then cut and paste (steve said thats how he does it) but i am a creature of habit and do it on a wing and prayer. from my brain to my fingertips to the blog.
ill get back to it soon i hope. it was a fun recollection.
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I do the same thing Steve does if I’m working on a long post, only I use Stickies, which makes it easy to discard the note after the post is posted.
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thanks linda
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Boy, I can’t even remember doing anything stupid with a shovel, let alone anything “impressive.” I once went deep into the Boundary Waters Wilderness in late winter by dogsled and slept that night in an igloo we made using shovels. The igloo got too warm and collapsed. Happily enough, the roof fell in when we were around the campfire cooking trout and knocking back mugs of sherry. We slept in the ruins of the igloo, for no particular reason, but we had to sleep somewhere and it sort of seemed the we were “inside” when we were in the walls of the collapsed igloo. And my clearest memory of that trip was coming out of the wilderness on the second night. The only thing I could hear was the panting of the dogs, the thumping of their feet on the snow and the shusssssh of the runners gliding. In the moonlight the lakes were a dull blue color, and in that clean air the throbbing stars were so close it seemed like we could snatch a few of them without reaching very hard. Only time I ever used a shovel.
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great wordsmithing but are you sure you’re from iowa with no shovel experience. i would have lost a dollar on that one.
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I regularly try to do impressive things with shovels in our garden. We have gradually eroded the lawn space in our yard over the years, turning it into flower beds or vegetable patches. The people who owned the house before we did unwisely put in lots of landscaping with shrubs and filled in the space around the shrubs with rocks. Many of the shrubs were planted too close together and became overgrown. My husband and I have shoveled and hauled more rocks than I care to think about. Our next task with shovels will be to go to the local stockyard and get a load of composted manure to spread in the new garden plot. We tell ourselves every year that we won’t have to plant many more perennials but there always seems to be room for more.
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wonderful project. get a picture when its in bloom. hack a picture as you are cytting it back along with that come next june would be great. good stewardship is a wonderful thing
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you’d think id look a little at the typing wouldn’t you?
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The President has lately been in trouble for saying that there’s no such thing as a “shovel-ready” project. I know a couple of well-established patches of burdock I could introduce him to.
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Can’t yet think of digging anything that hasn’t been mentioned. But Trevannian wrote a great espionage novel, Loo Sanction or Eiger Sanction, about spelunking in… what’s that area between France and Spain…?
Just spent the day moving a friend, could now use a shovel at her old place, or maybe a backhoe, to get the rest out. Luckily she’s paying for both places for a couple more weeks.
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I recall digging a pretty impressive hole with a friend one summer – the proverbial “digging to China” project essential to every kid’s life. We got it deep enough, as I recall, that we got her older brother over to help for a bit (since he was taller). Mom wasn’t ecstatic about the hole in her side yard, but figured that since it was bordered on one side by bushes and our house on the other (and tucked behind enough that you couldn’t see if from the front yard. Had we dug in the back yard proper, I’m sure it would have been a shorter-lived project.
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Good morning a day late,
I was disoriented yesterday and completely forgot to look at this blog. I wll make a short comment today even if I am a day late.
I am the shovel man. I don’t have any power eqipment for tilling my fairly large garden, I just use my shovel. Almost everyone has a snowblower. All I have is a snow shovel. I actually like shoveling snow, but my neighbors often think they are helping me when they clean part of my walks with their snow blowers. Actually, I don’t mind getting some help with snow removal when we have a really heavy snow storm.
I have friends who do caving and I went with them once into a cave where you had to crawl through narrow spaces. I’m not doing that again. I don’t know why those cavers like going into those narrow spaces except that they do sometimes lead to large unexplored caves.
Okay, that is all I have a day late and, what should I say. many brain cells short.
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Jim, Husband is just like you about digging gardens – a little at a time. And MAYBE this year I can entice him to get a snow blower. We shared on with a neighbor once, which worked out pretty well, but otherwise it has been shovels all these years..
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Have not thought of this in years. My kids think I exaggerate this story, but I do not:
When I was 4 my parents bought an old very un-modern house on the backside of the Sawtooth Hills near Two Harbors. By the time I was 13 they were ready to expand the cellar–once entered through a trap door in the kitchen floor–out to near the new solid perimeter foundation, to add central wood heat, by installing an old coal furnace my father got free by taking it out of another house (my parents were way ahead of their time on reduce, reuse, recycle). My father had added a back porch with excellent cement steps down into the cellar. Because by then we knew I got very sick in the hay mow, my father did the hay work each day and assigned me instead to haul dirt (good North Shore red clay) out of the basement into a dumping trailer (he had built out of an old 36 Chevy) parked by the back door. So after I had filled two wood boxes, cleaned the barn, tended the chickens, and done any other duties, I filled and carried ten-gallon pails with dirt and carried them up, two-at-a-time, doing 10 trips every day, seven days a week. My father and mother did some too during the day. It was more pick work to get the clay loose enough to shovel into the pails. I used to wonder how long that clay had lain there. Over the course of a late summer, fall, winter and early spring we got the job done. Then it was my job to haul gravel to lay down as a pad for the cement floor. I had to shovel the gravel into the trailer from a pit on our land, tow it to the back door with the tractor, load it into the pails and haul it down. I did all of that alone. It really did not seem onerous to do, but it does when I describe it.
When I was 24 I bought a cabin on the Lake Superior and rebuilt it into a house. Ten years later I needed to stabilize the perimeter foundation from frost. So I dug a trench 2.5 feet deep and 2 feet wide ¾ of the way around the house (the back of the house sat on bed rock). I had to add 6 inches of sand at the bottom of the pit and six inches on the top of the Styrofoam I laid down. I did it all by shovel and wheelbarrow over about 7 weeks (had summers off).
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Wow. We’re not worthy.
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My Dad gave my brother and me a project somewhat like Clyde describes about. We dug, with pick and shovel, the footings and crawl space for the house my Dad built for the family. We also mixed the cement by hand, moved the cement in a wheel barrow, and filled the footings and removable frames that made the walls of the crawl space with the cement. My Dad was very thrifty and didn’t buy or rent much power equipment. With some help from my brother and me, he built the entire house with his own hands except for the installation of the siding.
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Soulmates, you and I, Jim.
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Jim and Clyde,
I also did a LOT of shovel work as a kid, assisting my father who was a do-it-yourselfer in every aspect of home improvement and maintenance. We had a fallout shelter under the garage at one house, and an in-ground swimming pool. Lots of concrete was poured for various projects along the way and much of it was mixed in a clattering old machine that we shoveled sand, gravel and cement into by the bucketful.
And I’m with you Jim – I am my own snowblower.
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Dale and Jim–my father had the same clattering old cement mixer to do many projects, several buildings for instance–barn, house foundation, shop, etc. I used to shovel a 175 foot driveway.
Maybe all that explains the stenosis and back surgeries.
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Well, my Dad just had a big sheet of metal and a box to use in mixing cement. The box went on the metal and was filled with the sand, gravel, and cement and then the box was lifted. A holding area was made in the middle of the pile, water was added and it all was mixed with shovels. Boy was that fun! My Dad learned this method in an engineering lab class in college.
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Glad you’re back, Clyde, what kind of limbo?
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Limbo has two meanings. 1) up in the air, hanging fire, to be resolved. Major pieces of my life fit that description right now. 2) Time you spend paying for your sins; and I am paying for my $in$ right now.
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That’s an amazing amount of work, Clyde. Wow. I don’t think anybody takes on such a difficult project these days. Do you think working that hard on the basement improved your character? Or was it just a ton of hard, hard work?
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It was what you did in my family. It was not the childhood of many people my age–Ben and Dale are as rare as I was–but it was the childhood of much of the generation before mine. I did not think about it or rebel–it was my contribution to the betterment of the family. At the age of 12 I worked pretty much sun-up to sun-down on weekends and the summer–as did my parents, their siblings. cousins, friends, neighbors.
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great end to the shovel weekend jim clyde and dale. it is interesting how none of you thought of it as being put upon. it was just doing work like it was supposed to be done. my kids get upset when i don’t thank them enough for pitching in and helping out around the house whenever they do. they are good workers but they don’t hold the same level of shared responsibility i was brought up with. work like you are describing has always struck me as meditation. feels good when its done.
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Afternoon…
I’ve dug odds and ends… do post holes count? Those weren’t with a shovel of course but a post hole digger…
I once crawled through an 18″ diameter culvert 120′ long. It goes under a dam on our property and it doesn’t hold water normally, just slows the water down in a heavy rain… I was probably 15 years old when I crawled through there…
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here at last is the story i typed up saturday morning before i wiped it out. second time was an interesting challange. tough timing this weekend. nice to have a work ethic weekend story dale. it turned out to be a good blog topic. you just never know do you?
its a bit of a stretch but i thought i’d recall the summer after my senior year in high school when i decided to go travel around the country on a one year jaunt and to finance it i asked my grandfather if i could work for him at his construction company. he built roads and bridges. he was my moms dad and was a self made man who bought a new t bird every time there was a body change when i as a kid and he was a super neat guy who would take me to the gophers (when they were good in 1960-65 and to the cottage on leach lake, but over the years we had lost the mutual admiration society when my dad who had been working for him left because my grandfather wanted to make certain he showed no family favoritism to the point that he showed reverse favoritism. i was in 2nd grade at the time and by the time 10 years later rolled around and i asked a favor my grandfather had expressed his concern for my wayward leanings and he thought i should start living some other sort of life. i didn’t appreciate his imput and he didn’t appreciate my not appreciating him. when i went to ask him for the job he made a point of the fact that i had not been his friend for a long time like we used to be and now here i was asking him a favor. well he said, if you want to work at my company i will ask that you cut your hair. i happened to be ready to go from the long haired hippy to the next phase of life but i wsn’t about to tell him. i went to a friend with a scissors and a grooming bent and trimmed up the hair. i went back to my grandfather ready for assignment and he kind of looked up over the top of his glasses and said he was surprised. he thought i wouldn’t do it or if i did it would be something equally in your face like a shaved head or a mohawk. when i saw that you have a nice haircut i will offer you a job at the bridge we are building in owatonna and pay you 5.00 an hour. that was the low end of low on the construction payrole. but before you go here is my business card and you go to my personal barber and have him trim your beard so you look respectable and you will be good to go. i was so angry i didn’t even respond. i just turned and walked out and never asked him for anything else again. i had lots of other ass kissing relatives who could play suck up and i had not intention of carryng this charade any further. when i told my dad i what an unhappy camper i was and he said he was glad i discovered the same thing he had about my grandfather. he wasn’t mean or ornery he was just who he was and not the kind of guy you’d enjoy having coffee with or counting as one of your friends. a sad thing to say about your grandfather but a sadder thing not to say. well my dad mentioned that if i really wanted to work construction , one of his buddies ( who i knew well as a close family friend) lived across the street from one of the construction companies that do lots of work in the twin cities and he’d ask if there might be a chance for work. i was hired that week to work over at a limestone quarry that was used to build ft snelling all those years ago. the quarry is near the fort right there on shepard road (its now a park and ride) , I got there the first day and caught hell for not knowing that one of the cardinal rules of construction work, you need to be there 15 minutes early for coffee in the morning to chat and go over what we will do today. I was angry for atching hell and was working through my frustration and venting by going hard and digging the limestone out and pitching it down the hill. I heard about it afterwards but didn’t think anything of it at the time. I heard I was flipping the rocks from the top of the rock pile down to the bottom where the pickers were to put it in the bucket. the boss was nice man named stan who was forman on this job for the first time in his career. He was in charge of a crew of other guys who were there as a favor to the owners and it was kind of a crew of misfits, lots of ski bums working summer to get money to bum in the rockies all winter. the only legit construction guys were the heavy equiptment operators and you could see they got a kick out of the situation. stan was a nice man who shook his head at his loot in life and tried to make it through the day with as little pain as possible. It was a little like hearding cats to try to get these guys to work the plan. There were three ways to get the limestone, one was to pick it out of the pile of dirt the bulldozer would push at the end of a process. 2 was to pick the rock out of the side tf a hill as the bulldozer would scrape away 6 incehs of the side of a hill creating a half dome type of effect and we would pick the rock out of the side hill and then they would take of another 6 inches, we would make piles of rocks that were like cookie sheet sized and 4-6 inches thick. Like big bricks to build or rebuild walls out of. The third way was the best. It was to swing a 12 lb sledge hammer at a wedge and to lift big plates of limestone up enough to break into garbage can cover sized pieces. You’d end up working a 10×10 or 20×20 area and then going down another 6 inches and doing it again and trying to work as deep and wide as you could. The best rocks came out that way and the work was hard but rewarding in that you gor big pile of great quality limestone in a relatively short amount of time. the job ended after about 6 weeks and all the boys said their farewalls and stan came over to me and one other guy and told us that because we were good workers we got to go to a jobsight and build a high school in white bear lake. the good news bad news as to my travel plans were that I was so resented by the new forman for getting the job as a gopher that he gave the two of us very difficult jobs we were certain to fail at so he could fore us within the week. We ran power tampers filling 20 foot deep holes, took down scaffolding that was used to spray the ceiling in the auditorium up near the catwalks and shuttling the debris in power wheelbarrows to the dumpster. It was all set up for us to fail by taking too long for the prescribed allotted time. The guy I got promoted to this job site was going to take it to the next level and try to get the job to stick. I gave him my phone number and told him to contact me as a witness or call me with back pay for being fired in an unfair way. so the shovel work that came to mind was a short term summer construction job that got me from being directionless at the end of high school to the trip of the following 6 months that took me to the canadian rockies and out to the west coast before I decided to come back to Minnesota, study art and music at the u of m and get to know my dad a bit better buy working at selling with him after having a difficult transition from kid to young adult. He turned out to be a really good friend and selling turned out to be a good way for me to enjoy the art and music in my own fashion that has remained front and center to this day.
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That’s a fascinating story, tim, with so many plot twists that (like real life) it doesn’t lend itself to simple summaries. I think I see one thing as a constant in your highly varied lifestyle: integrity. You zig and you zag and change your mind, but whatever you are doing you seem naturally to want to do it with integrity. If the rest of life is as unpredictable and changeable as Minnesota weather, being true to yourself and to the act of living seems like an excellent thing to accept as a constant.
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thanks steve.
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I missed yesterday… big projects afoot here.
I dug out a medium size tree by hand about 18 years ago… the tree guy said it had to go, but the estimates I got from various folks were so far above my budget that I did it myself. (This is the same tree that took out the power saw – I think I’ve written about it before.) Anyway, for some reason, it needed to be done in one day; I don’t remember but maybe it was because the new tree was already here. Not sure. Anyway, as if it weren’t too big a job for a chain saw and a shovel, it started to rain. I don’t think I’ve ever been that dirty since.
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