Personal Growth

The edge of my spade finds a crack in the dirt, and very carefully I push my weight down onto its handle, driving the blade deeper and deeper into the ground until it is covered completely. Switching my grip, I pull back on the handle and remove a small pile of earth from its shallow, pitiful hole, dumping it unceremoniously to the side. I wipe my brow of the sweat that is already starting to form there. Small, devious, and glistening clues giving me away as somebody new. Somebody who has never done this part before. But it's not the digging I’m afraid of, that was normal, but today is special.

I look behind me to where a small wheelbarrow, overflowing with saplings, sits by a pickup truck haphazardly parked in the shade of some of the area’s remaining old-growth pine. There is very little of it left now, which is why we are here. To start anew. My boss, Whit, an old, grizzled bastard of a man, is somewhere on the other side of the truck, flies and mosquitoes undoubtedly already surrounding his head and crawling up and down his red, craggy neck. He had started digging holes a long time ago, when he was my age, but now I’m the one digging the holes, and he’s the one I’m digging this hole for. The corporate ladder in this line of work is more of a stepstool.  

I look back to my new hole. I hate this part of the job, and much to my chagrin, the hole has not doubled in size while my back was turned. I can hear Whit saying, “it ain’t going to dig itself.” He didn’t actually say it, but he may as well have, the way his voice bounces around in my head. Whit speaks in platitudes because he thinks I’m too stupid to notice. I regard my hole for another second before I slam my shovel back into the dirt.

“Only another fifteen hundred to go,” I say to myself, as I twist my wrists and free another mound of earth from its home, disrupting a millennium of glacial morphology and the gifts it had left behind. But I find nothing of interest as shovelful after shovelful is discarded over my shoulder at a rate that Whit would deem acceptable, if not a little overzealous. We work long days, and wasted motion ought not be part of the game plan. 

I look back over my shoulder towards the wheelbarrow again. Today it is filled with saplings donated by a nursing home and an elementary school. How pleased the elderly and the children had been to help us with our mission: the geriatrics looking for forgiveness for what their generation had done to our planet and their descendants hoping to stymie the inevitable until they too can sew their needlepoint for a good cause. How disappointed would they be to know that eighty percent of these young trees won’t survive their first winter, and the rest will one day be used to saddle-notch a rich man’s summer home. The only way they will ever help humans breathe is if they are used to build a sauna. 

I’m making progress now; the hole has grown rapidly in both circumference and depth. Using my shovel as a measuring stick, I drop the blade into the centre of the hole, holding the tip of the handle between my thumb and forefinger. Not quite there, but getting close. 

“Getting close, Whit,” I call out, but expecting no reply. “Maybe another foot or so.” 

The sun is high in the sky now and is beating down on my shoulders and neck, but the discomfort of a sunburn is no longer something I have to deal with after a long summer of digging directly below another hole in the ozone layer. I imagine it to look much like a fine mesh shirt or a butterfly net these days. The delicate pink skin I had arrived with in early May had long since been replaced with a thick hide of dark red elephant skin, and I no longer tossed and turned in the night desperately trying to find a way to sleep on scorched and tender flesh. 

As sweat runs quietly and steadily down my back, I quicken my pace, hoping I can finish the job at hand without interruption. The realization dawned that what had started as an extraordinary day was still going to come to a close the same way as all the others: with me digging. The greatest of mountains are most often flanked by the grandest of valleys. I should have done this months ago, which makes me think of another of Whit’s banal clichés. 

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.”  

With the hole now deep enough, I climb in and begin to straighten the edges. Whit was big on clean and tidy work, and despite our differences I still want him to be proud of the job I had accomplished today. If he would even notice, which I doubt. Once the edges are square I climb out and again look down to assess my drudgery, breathing heavily from my extra effort. Content with it, I toss down my shovel and walk slowly back towards the truck. 

“It’s all ready now, Whit,” I say, as I pass by the wheelbarrow, not giving the saplings a second glance. I can see the small note that had come from the elementary school thanking us for our efforts sitting on the dash of the half-ton. It had been made by the children on homemade paper and had small flower seeds stuck to the front of it. Perhaps I could toss it in the hole too, I thought. I reach through the open window and grab it, putting it in my back pocket.  

I cross in front of the truck and walk to the other side of the tree it was parked beside. Whit was still where I had left him, crumpled on a small blue tarp in the shade of the great pine tree. There was a large, dark mark on the left side of his face where I had struck him with my spade when we arrived early this morning. A small trickle of blood had formed a delicate pool of red below his ear, but besides that he could have been sleeping. 

“C’mon, Whit. Daylight’s wasting.” Another one of his favourites. I grab two edges of the tarp and begin to drag it and Whit towards my perfectly manicured hole. Once we reach it, I stand above him for a minute collecting my thoughts. Then with a swift kick, I send his body flying into his final resting place.

I look down at him for a moment, regarding his lifeless body in a hole he most certainly would have approved of in any other circumstance. I then reach down and grab my shovel. 

“Like you always said, Whit, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.” 

I smile and pick up a shovelful of dirt, hanging it over the hole. Over Whit. 

“The second best time is now.”