My "Holey" Uncle

     My Uncle has always been interested in the earth.  His uncle Roger sent him a book for Christmas every year, and these books were usually about geology.  Leo doesn't know why they were about geology, but he always found the books extremely interesting.  His fascination in the earth was often manifested by his digging around, where he discovered neat things.  

     His first digging adventure occurred at the age of four or five when he was digging with a soppn in his front yard by the sidewalk.  He found something.  "I didn't know what it was, just a little nodule of some sort."  He brought it inside and set it on the radiator in the kitchen.  As it turns out, it was a grasshopper egg case.  When it warmed up on the radiator, all the grasshoppers hatched!  What made matters worse, the kitchen floor was an old linoleum with little specks on it.  "You could drop a piece of toast on the kitchen floor and lose it," he said.  All the practically invisible baby grasshoppers started hopping around the kitchen and into the rest of the house.

     He kept digging as he grew older.  He decided to dig a bomb shelter in the crawl-space of their house.  He had an electric light on an extension cord so he coulc see as he dug.  "The dirt was real hard, it's like clay when you get just down beneath the surface of the topsoil.  It's just solid clay, really hard to dig because there's no toom with the floor joists above your head.  But it was fun," he says.  Years later a mechanic came to fix the dryer vent and had to do a bit of work in the crawlspace.  He went down below, and after a couple minutes came up and said to my grandmother, "Lady, do you know there's a big hole underneath your house?"  It is still there to this day.

     My uncle soon started another hole in one corner of the backyard.  He says it was about six feet deep and roughly four feet across.  He found some near tocks and was amazed to find earthworms down there, six feet down in the solid clay.  He put a 2x6 board across "the hole," as it was named, to help prevent people from falling in.  It didn't work too well.  His younger sister tried to ride a tricycle across the board, and she fell into the hole.  He was forced to fill it in, "But, I put a cigar box down there, and I put in some trinkets.  I couldn't even tell you what I put in there, maybe a dime and who knows what else."  He was about ten or twelve.

     After these adventures, Leo moved on from the books given to him by his uncle, to those required by his professors.  He went on to get his Master's degree in Geology.  He now knows that the clay he had to dig through is termed "Glacial till," because it was deposited by the glaciers in the ice age.  He no longer has time for digging holes, but still enjoys finding rocks, identifying plants, and learning about the world around him.