The poet who told us “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” was clearly not a farmer. I think a farmer would have mentioned postholes somewhere in the same verse.
After a winter of Biblical snowfalls and a late season whack from an ice storm, I don’t have to walk the fence lines to know there will be many flat spots and dozens of fence posts to replace.
I’ve been digging postholes since I was old enough to pick up a round-mouth shovel. For the first two decades I dug in sand at my mother’s farm thirty miles south of where I live now. On one project, my brother and I went on a spree for a fence in the lower pasture along the stream, digging 27 holes three feet deep in a single day. Even the old guy who was supervising us was impressed. I remember him saying, “If that shovel gets too hot, Danny, throw it down and I’ll give you another one.” The following day we climbed a little knoll of gravel and clay where the digging was much harder.
That day we only dug three. I became stoop shouldered by the age of 18 and always attributed my posture to the length of time I had spent at the end of a shovel.
In my thirties, I moved to this farm, which is a land of heavy red clay and football sized stones that lurk below the surface like sea monsters. I quickly learned that you can’t dig a posthole in any month with a vowel in it. I invested in a five-foot crowbar and two shovels, both with forged steel shanks, the kind they stopped making in 1980 in favour of the cheap hollow shank variety made in China. Since then, I have replaced the handles on those two shovel heads on multiple occasions and they still work just fine.
I have always loved the smell of fresh turned dirt in the springtime. I have an odd habit of sticking my head right into the hole and breathing deep of the cool pungent air. It clears my brain and I come away refreshed. Imagine my surprise when I read a study a few years ago that examined a common microbe in topsoil known as Mycobacterium vaccae and found it may play a role in raising serotonin levels in the human body, a substance that regulates mood and contributes to mental health. Soil microbes may be working in ways similar to widely prescribed antidepressant drugs.
I think I already knew that. Most writers, in fact anyone with an instinct for reflection, will enter a struggle with the dreaded ‘black dog’ of depression at some point in their lives. I encountered the first whiff of it as a teenager and found that the return of the sun and the chance to scrabble in the dirt never failed to lift my spirits. The first weapon I would recommend in a struggle with depression would be a shovel, if the season permits.
There is an art to a posthole. The first two feet are straightforward, but the final foot requires a bit of dexterity to keep the dirt on the blade as you lift it without hitting the side of the hole and losing it all. Any number of nifty tools have been invented to help extract dirt efficiently but none of them work. Wrist action combined with modest expectations about how fast this can be done do the trick. Stones are a game changer and if they can’t be dislodged or broken with the crowbar a change of location might be required.
Of course, all of this is rendered obsolete if you own a posthole auger and a 50 hp tractor. Zip, zip and it’s done. There’s no chance to linger and sniff the dirt anymore. But there will always be those special places where the fifty horses lock onto a piece of the Canadian Shield three feet down and grunt to an abrupt halt.
Then it will take picks, shovels, crowbars and profanity to hack a hole three times larger than what was planned. Sometime through the afternoon I will pause the operation to stick my head in the dirt and breathe it all in. Because it is very good for one’s mental health.