The Dirt Pile

My parents currently live in a condo, and ~2 years before that, a townhome, and ~2 years before that a different condo, however ~2 years before that, we all lived in a house! It was a real house, with 4 separate walls, and 3/4 acre of land. But this is not about the house. It is about the dirt pile. It began when I was in the age range of about preschool to 3rd grade. Now, bear (is that the right "bear"?) with me, because I this happened along time ago, and the details may be a bit fuzzy, or outright fabrications.

The best thing in the world, which occupied the vast majority of my me and my brothers time, was the dirt pile. it was the most entertaining entity in the world. What was the dirt pile you may ask? Actauly, you probably would not ask that, as the name is painfully self explanatory, and a Hallmark to the unimaginative properties of my childhood mind. But you should still ask, because the dirt pile was not, as the name implies, a pile of dirt. 

Quite the opposite in fact.

It was a hole-  in the dirt.

Now, I honestly do not know how we came to naming our favorite play thing so inaccurately, but for whatever reason it stuck. My leading theory is we used to play on a pile of dirt, and then discovered that playing in the hole from which the dirt was dug was much more fun (I have no such memory, but then again I am probably not a reliable source for know what I don't know)

Okay, so its a hole in ground. Roughly circular, four feet in diameter, about a foot and half deep, with sloping walls. My brother and I could comfortably sit in the hole, oblivious to the muck, without it being crowded.

The possibilities were limited only by our imaginations, which were mostly filled with horrific disasters, including, but not limited to, land slides, floods, meteorites and dinosaur ambushes. 

At the time, we spent all of our pocket money on little plastic dinos sold at a local health food store. With these we acted out the various prehistoric dramas involving a herbivores life in the cretaceous period- getting eaten, getting caught in landslides, getting eaten, getting stuck in tar pits, getting eaten, being washed away by floods, getting eaten, and so forth. They would flee around the craggy rims of the dirt piles, leaving 3 toed footprints in the mud for the raptor pack to follow. One time, a couple plant eaters got caught in a cave in when they explored a cavern, and we forgot they were there until weeks later we were digging and came across the pocket of air and rescued them. 

The dirt pile became exponentially more fun when you added water. Unfortunately it became experientially less fun for our parents when water was added, and we would spend hours begging to use the hose to fill the pile with water, only to have out parents say we could have one bucket full- no matter we had a way of accidentally leaving the hose running while we wandered off in search of something innocent to do. We had endless fun digging little canals and holding ponds, and water falls, and dams to hold the water, with slowly eroding jetties with dinos trapped on them. With the high pressure nozzle, you could bore a hole into the side of the pile, and we had fanciful ideas of filling the holes with baking soda and vinegar to blow up the mountain side- in hind sight in surprised neither of us turned into mining experts. The next day, when the water had sunk into the ground, there would be glorious deposit of mud to play with- a powerful building material when combined with grass clippings. 

At the end of the day, the main result was that we had once again completely trashed out clothes, to our parents chagrin. One time, when were allowed only a gallon of water, and we "forgot" to turn of the hose, and  soaked out shorts in mud, like we promised we wouldn't, we snuck into our room via the totally not raptor proof sliding glass door, and changed into new shorts of the same design, and deposited the evidence in the washing machine. 

I recently saw a PBS program on giant mining machines, and was awed by a simulated mining environment, where trainees for the big expensive mining shovels get to practice in a scaled down room filled with dirt and scaled down machines, hooked up to full sized control booths.