Excavation
by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Dig Site
~ San Miguel, California, 1991
What I find: a tiny wooden horse, smooth from where blade whittled wood, legs delicate as matchsticks. A golden stamp, slick replica of the ones my mother lets me lick. A tiny silver spoon with an engraving of New York State to hold in your mouth. A key to nowhere anyone knows. The rusted half of a friendship necklace—no chain. A blue button. A brassy marble. A yellow ceramic tiger.
There’s a golden brooch in the shape of a turtle, emeralds for eyes, a marbled peach stone for a shell. I imagine him swimming across someone’s lapel. My favorite is a tiny metal pail on its side, surrounded by spilled ceramic milk, and a Siamese kitten, head bent to lap the froth. I cup the vignette in the palm of my hand.
I find the treasure hole one Sunday, just off the patio where my parents sit together watching trains clack by on the rails beyond our yard. Using a kitchen spoon, I chip away at the hard dirt. At last, my father leans over to take the utensil from my hand, spooning a mound of dirt away for me, the earth softer below. He builds fences for a living and spends his days removing dirt, adding posts in such a way that erosion or strong wind won’t knock them down. He knows everything about dirt, I think. Everything about making things permanent.
Despite the shallow divot, I find treasure, a shiny penny resting where it hadn’t been before. Then a quarter, three dimes. I hold up my findings, gleeful that out of all the dirt in the backyard, I’ve managed to discover the sweet spot. Soon I’ve amassed quite a collection, an entire world in miniature, pulled from the earth with my hands.
Dig Site
~ Morro Bay, California, 1988
On hot summer days, my father drives us to the coast. He walks the length of the beach, his work boots going squelch in the damp, the indentations filling in with water and sand.
I struggle to leave a mark. My brief hollows fill in quickly, and no matter how far I dig my toes into the sand, as soon as I remove myself, my dents vanish as though I was never there.
Sometimes I find scuttling sand crabs and am surprised there is life here, for this seems a place of impermanence. If I can’t manage to leave my print across this place, I am surprised anything exists.
Dig Site
~ Santa Barbara, California, 1975
Walking the length of a new divide, my father uses orange paint to mark the line where he will build a fence. His work boots easily crush weeds, depress dirt. He carries a shovel shaped like an arcade machine claw, pulling up as his prize soil, rocks, and bits of vegetation, roots dangling down like worms. Over and over, he pulls earth from the same hole, until a cylinder stretches several feet down, the surrounding soil like a layered cake.
He moves down the line, leaving precise holes behind. Later he fills the holes with cement, a fence post planted as if a flag. At first the flags are of discovery, of ownership, but when he builds the fence, the flags become boundaries and borders, keeping things in and out, determining where one thing ends and another begins.
Using his tools to excavate, alter the earth, makes my father mapmaker, enforcer, creator. Because he shapes the soil, he shapes the world.
Dig Site
~San Miguel, California, 1993
The frog is dead, crushed beneath the foot of a boy at school and tossed into the garbage can. Patting my back as I sob, my teacher locates a small cardboard box for me to transport the creature, and sends an apologetic note home to my parents.
Bumpy, I name the frog on the school bus, weeping mournfully into my father’s shoulder when he comes home from work, comforted by the smell of sawdust mixed with his sweat.
Though he dutifully digs a hole, builds a cross out of wood and carves Bumpy’s name, my father cannot understand why I am so comforted by the act of burial. He tells me the frog does not need such elaborate mourning, for I visit the grave each afternoon, fascinated by the raised dome of dirt, sad when the sand begins to settle.
Still, he buries the next few pets, a tiny cemetery growing in the corner of our yard.
Dig Site
~ Camp Chumash, Lake Cachuma, California, 1996
At camp, we eat pudding cups in a cross-legged circle. We learn the California soil is full of Indigenous artifacts and we spend an afternoon digging and looking for shiny beads and polished arrowheads. It seems there are enough treasures in the small plot of dirt for every child and dozens more, and we hold our beads of blue and our glinting obsidian tight in our hands as we leave the camp, drive back to school, past the new construction site where the first Wal-Mart in a hundred miles is under construction.
Soon, workers discover relics and bones, and though we have learned to hold artifacts tight, a great local fight breaks out between historians and activists, city planners and bargain-minded citizens. They debate about land ownership and burial, how long ago constitutes history and where progress should begin, and at last they decide artifacts and even the bones of the dead don’t matter as much as development, and they pave right over the richness of that place, an endless parking lot for the new store at the surface.
Dig Site
~Grand Canyon, Arizona, 2008
The canyon mirrors the void in my father. After nearly thirty years with the same construction company, excavating job sites, building borders, shaping the land with his hand, he was forced into early retirement. Now, without his work, he feels purposeless.
At home, he shuffles from room to room, his hands worrying at his sides. Restless.
Now he says little as we stand at the lip of the earth, before it plunges sharp and rocky into the deep crevasse.
My mother worries he will kill himself without the joy of getting his hands dirty.
My father and I stand together in silence, unsure of who he is without his work, what we will talk about now. We are surrounded by red striation and deep purple shadow. It is hot enough to see things that aren’t there.
For a long while we stare at what happens when something is carved away, disappeared by the force of time, left to vanish to dust.
Dig Site
~ Mission San Miguel, California, 2012
They want the bones. At school my brothers learn about the historic Spanish mission a block from our home, the buried dead stretching beyond the low adobe walls that contain the mission graveyard, hidden for miles despite the fence. My brothers want to know why we walk on the dead, why the border was never moved, why it appears one way on the surface, but is so different beneath.
There is an empty lot behind the mission, a field of dirt clods and weeds, yellow mustard plants dotting the summer. My brothers use sticks and sharp rocks to dig. They are desperate to get underground—they must find out what happens when the borders do not hold.
What they find: cigarettes, old bottle caps, a rubber band so brittle from the sun it breaks at their touch, a dozen bullet casings. When we head home, their pockets jingle.
Dig Site
~ San Diego, California, 2009
My father searches for his dead brother. He drives eight hours to his childhood hometown, wandering cemetery hills in his work boots and failing to locate the grave where his infant brother was buried fifty years ago. When darkness arrives, he leaves, shaking his head.
The cemetery mails a map of the grave’s location and my father carries it in his pocket for weeks, folded precisely, the symmetry of his imposed order a reminder that humans seek to shape the earth in life and death.
My family arrives at the cemetery for another exploration, and the funeral home manager leads my father to where the grave should be and takes the map, soft and faded from being opened and closed so many times, from his callused hands. She radios the office and someone brings a new map. Everyone stands, rubbing the backs of their heads in confusion
Suddenly, my father bends low to the ground, pulls out his pocket knife and plunges it into the grass. He saws at the soil.
A maintenance crew appears on a golf cart, hopping out with shovels and trowels, prepared to dig up the entire hillside. They shout, forty feet down the hill. My dead uncle has slipped out of mind and so sight. Ownership only extends so far down. There is his tombstone, newly excavated.
My father stares into the hole as though he is looking into his own grave.
Dig Site
~ Templeton, California, 1995, Revisited 2015
We bury the things we believe will define us after death. We bury ourselves for the future. In this way, we write the histories that will prevail.
As elementary students—the first, in fact, at this newly constructed school—we discuss what to add to the capsule during the principal’s morning announcements, during math, on the bus. We have recently discovered the radio, so we want to include music in the capsule, maybe even a Walkman if someone can manage to steal it from an older sibling. We suck sour candies each lunch period, trying to fight the grimace, so naturally, these should be included, along with Pringles and Gatorade. We want to add Troll dolls, skateboards, Gak.
For weeks leading up to the burial, we debate—it turns out the capsule is quite small so we’ll have to be selective, just one item per grade. Nothing we suggest is selected and we aren’t allowed to watch the burial because administrators worry we’ll dig it up and share the spoils. We never bother—none of the treasures we want to share with the future make it underground.
It turns out the future means just twenty years, and the elementary school celebrates its anniversary by digging up what they’d buried not so very long ago. But rules at the surface are not the same. They cannot locate the time capsule.
Futile digging leaves the campus full of holes and eventually people bring out metal detectors and witching sticks in their attempt to divine the past.
We lost ourselves, our best intentions swallowed up underground. Perhaps it is best we never found the parts of ourselves we buried, for they never seemed accurate anyway.
Dig Site
~ Paso Robles, California, 2003
The house rumbles, guttural, like digestion. At first I think it is my younger siblings upstairs, but the vibration, I realize, comes from underground.
At the surface, sound becomes movement, the ground rolling underfoot, the whole world shuddering. Pictures fly off the walls, plates burst from kitchen cabinets to shatter on the floor, books slip from their shelves like the world is melting, the walls strangely liquid as the house shimmies on its foundation.
When I find my motionless siblings, wide-eyed and crying, I press our bodies together like something solid. It seems the earth betrays us. We are usually unaware of its silent movement, but now the whole world is in flux and nowhere is safe.
After the shaking stops, it starts again, and again, fifty aftershocks in just a few hours, magnitudes enough to make you stumble, lose balance, fall to your knees. We are on our knees all afternoon and well into the evening.
Down the street, the California Mission that has stood hundreds of years splits in two, a great gash like a wailing mouth through the chapel. Gas and water lines are destroyed, so we aren’t to drink the water. We eat food from the fridge before it spoils and when the sun goes down, we light candles that cast shadows about the room. It looks like the walls are moving again.
The 6.6 magnitude earthquake originates in the ocean, but stretches inland, leaving great cracks in the freeway like the earth is divided. I refer to the two sides as before and after. As then and now. What was and what will be.
The damage is worse further from the epicenter, destruction moving outwards in great circles. Brick buildings crumble in on themselves and two women are crushed to death while they shop at a local jeweler. It takes days to dig their bodies from the dust and diamonds.
An underground hot spring bursts, spewing gas and scalding water thirty feet into the air at 1,300 gallons a minute. The whole city smells of sulfur, chemical and rancid, like a burst bomb. It is difficult to see through the dust and steam.
A sinkhole forms in the parking lot of City Hall, like the earth has simply opened up and swallowed the world whole, dragging any semblance of order into its stinking belly.
My father is called to build a fence around the crater. He repairs the fences around the city too, sagging reminders that our boundaries and borders do not really exist, that there is no determining where one thing ends and another begins.
Dig Site
~ San Miguel, California, 1995
My sandbox sits at the far corner of the yard, separated from the grass by a border of wood. Sometimes I dig down along the wood to follow the border, surprised by how quickly it ends, amazed the sand and sod cooperate with such shallow order. Other times I dig deep trenches and fill them with water, smoothing the mud across my body. It is cool despite the summer heat, and it hardens like a second skin. I can see my hairs and pores underneath, as though I am made of dirt. When I breathe, my tummy lifts like the earth is breathing.
I make an oven in the corner of the sandbox, using mud and patience. Each day I add another layer to what has hardened the day before. I shape the rounded dome until it resembles the adobe oven at the mission down the road. I carve an opening to serve as the oven’s mouth. When the oven is complete, I bake mud pies and mud baked potatoes.
One day my father brings me a gift—a miniature set of post hole diggers, like the big ones he uses each day at work. I am ecstatic. I spend the afternoon digging in my sandbox, my hands soon covered in blisters that burst wet on the wooden handles, callusing like my father’s.
I spend an entire summer digging until part of the grass caves in. Because I’ve been digging along the wooden border, trying to get beyond its imposed order, I’ve weakened the lawn. I’ve removed so much soil in my attempts to get underground that there is nothing left to stand on.
Dig Site
~Morro Bay, California, 2019
We squat in the sand, dip our hands in the waves lapping at our feet. It is winter in California, so my father and I wear boots to the beach, wrap ourselves up against the cold. Though his balance is weakening, he still holds his hand out to me as I struggle to walk along the slippery rocks, make my way to the tidepools.
I am visiting from Massachusetts, where I live now, far away from my father, who ages more each time I return. He still wears work boots and digs holes in the yard, buries treasure, now for his grandchildren, who know him as soft and yielding.
We peer in the tidepools, looking for guppies and anemones. Looking for our own reflections.
I have returned because the Massachusetts winters make me so lonely I could split, make me hollow and joyless, sick for my father, aging so many miles away without me. My mind is a time capsule where he is always strong, smelling of sawdust and sweat.
I have also returned because my father is lonely in a way I have never seen. Many of his friends have died in the past few years, one hit by a car as he crossed the street, one slipping into a coma alone in his house, one shrinking with cancer until he simply disappeared. His father has died, his brothers and a grandchild sick with cancer, the earth, too, we are told, sick with fever, warming past the point of return.
My father collects his own treasures—a photo, a rock, a key—each time he loses someone, to create a makeshift altar in his workshop.
We don’t say much as we drive up and down the California coast where my father made his living building borders and boundaries, bending the land at the surface to his will. Nothing looks the same since my childhood, but my father knows each road and ocean inlet, like this hidden cove where the tide collects brightly colored starfish.
We sit, side by side and silent, in the coldest part of the year, when everything seems dying and dead. We reach our hands into the holes to see what we can find.
Later, as we walk back to the car, my father stoops to gather smooth pebbles, a feather, sand dollars, treasures to bury later.
Dig Site, Revisited
~ San Miguel, California, 2015
As an adult, I still have the tiny silver spoon, the small ceramic cat on the pool of milk, the golden stamp.
During a visit home, I reflect on the magic of that land. “What do you mean?” asks my father. He laughs and says he was responsible for those treasures. He says it like I’ve always known. When I protest, he explains, “I dropped them in when you weren’t looking.”
He paints the picture of my discovery: a penny glints beneath the dirt and I use my spoon to pull it from the earth, holding it up for my father to inspect, following his suggestion to show my mother across the patio, answering her many questions about how I found it, where I thought it came from, her reminder that we lived on the California Mission trail, rich with treasures. “I’d drop the next thing in while you were distracted,” my father laughs, “and put a little dirt over the top.”
I do not believe him when he says, “The hole was never more than a few inches deep.”
In my memory the hole was large enough for me to hide in, to fall headfirst into if I wasn’t careful, the result of hours of work, of believing, of good fortune. Now that I know the truth, it seems unlikely the treasure hole’s abundance lasted as long as it does in my mind. It must have been just a few brief months of discovery before the hole was forgotten.
“No, you dug in that same hole for years. From age five to eight, maybe longer,” my father says, and my heart lurches into my stomach the way it does when something is so sweet it hurts, when nostalgia sneaks up on you from behind and leaves you aching. At first I think I am sad because I have been fooled for so long, but then I realize that I am mourning what I thought I had—discovery, the ability to reach into the earth as far as my arm could go and grasp.
The richness of what I found! Where had my father managed to collect such things? It is this question that leaves me convinced he could not have been responsible. I list each item off—I’ve logged each excavation in my mind—in spite of all the years between then and now. My father laughs, delighted I remember so well.
“I found them on job sites,” he explains. And I picture him in work boots heavy with mud and cement, wandering through fields, using his body and his tools to lift great heaps of soil, to shape the land with his hands, leaving borders and boundaries behind.
Despite the noise from the tractors and the weight of the fence posts he hoists onto his back, he sees something in the dirt. He stops, bends, reaches down to sift through the soil, his fingers closing around a rock, a marble, a button, a yellow ceramic tiger. He wipes them each on his pants, takes stock of his finds, smiles at what the earth provides.
Later, he lets me do the same.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines including Brevity, Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, Fourth Genre, LitHub, The Normal School, Passages North, The Poetry Foundation, The Rumpus, Southeast Review and others. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery