A Hole is to Dig

By Todd NelsoncloseAuthor: Todd Nelson Name: Todd Nelson
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About: Todd R. Nelson has been a public and private school English teacher and administrator for 29 years, in schools in Cambridge, San Francisco, Chicago and Maine. Head of School at The School in Rose Valley (Pennsylvania).See Authors Posts (31)
 

Reflections upon reaching the water table in Schoolsville*

At the risk of dating myself, perhaps you recall Maurice Sendak’s A Hole is to Dig (1952). His charming drawings illustrated Ruth Krauss’s whimsical, simple definitions of things in the universe of childhood. “A face is so you can make faces,” or, “A whistle is to make people jump,” or “A lap is so you don’t get crumbs on the floor,” or “A principal is to take out splinters.” I can still see it on the bookshelf next to Chicken Soup with Rice. Before Max, before Pierre, Little Bear, Mickey, and the Light Princess, Sendak drew us kids in the fundamental activities of old-school play, back when nothing more than a piece of rope and a jump was required to have fun. Maurice could have been drawing Adams School last week.

Is a more complicated definition required than this: “A hole is to dig?” There is nothing quite so beguiling as just digging a hole in the ground. What mystery, inquiry, and engineering skills of all kinds are employed in simply digging a hole! Do you recall prior Adams digs, like the Castine Harbor Tunnel to Brooksville, which had its western terminus in our sandbox*, or the great Off-neck subway project (nixed, alas, by the planning board: “If we said yes to this, how would we say ‘no’ to the next Adams School project—like their proposed Castine-Belfast skyway?”).

The Adams sandhogs and engineers are quickly learning to gauge when a project requires permission, and when asking forgiveness is the better gambit just to get past the groundbreaking ceremony and make concrete flow. I know of other projects on the drawing boards, but “first rule of Adams Construction Club is ‘Don’t talk about Adams Construction Club.’” Sorry.

Clearly, they chose the right course of action on the latest opportunity, now that the construction is public. Our engineers have returned to subterranean projects: the Blackwood Park Well Project— BPWP for short. What appeared at first to be nothing more than a hole in the ground, has blossomed into a major public works project at the very least, and perhaps the start of a vast entrepreneurial boom.  It was uncertain, at first, whether the the hole was being surreptitiously refilled at night, or was truly flowing ground water. Once our hydrologists and geologists had determined that this was the actual water table, we knew we had a well, not just a hole. They installed the blowout preventer and put the second grade civil engineers to work on pipeline schematics.

Actually, given the surficial geology of the school and adjacent buildings, this might be considered a hole in the middle of a stream, if such a thing is possible. Our school property sits mid-current between Windmill Hill and the harbor.  As we discover each March, when snowmelt and a good heavy rain coincide, and all of the basements along the town common and Court Street flood, water wants to go back to the sea and will find the most direct route. Goldmine.

The new economic opportunities of our own well seemed obvious. Consider the savings on our quarterly water bill alone! We may be able to start a private utility and compete directly with the water board. A few neighbors have