there was something profound about me sitting there, staring across the highway at the mass of sand and gravel behind the hospital. the forest on the edge of the gravel pit abruptly stopped. the trees on the edge of the man-made canyon stood, shocked, protecting their precious siblings behind them. the trunks of the trees were bare - stripped naked by the harsh invasion of the massive pit below. they were changed, it seemed - unnatural looking in a place that should have been their rightful home.


as i sat looking at the walls of the enormous crater dug into the earth, i remembered a strange day in high school when we were piled into a school bus and carted to the gravel pit for an 'educational field trip'. we watched an instructional safety video about worksafe environments and nobody mentioned the fact that two teenagers had died while messing around in the gravel pit a few years earlier. people wore hard hats everywhere on site. we got back into the bus and began driving into the actual pit. the sand began to create colosseum-like walls around us as we drove, down...down...further into the pit. there was literally nothing to see. we gossiped to pass the time. dump trucks rolled past our bus. it was it's own contained society. i kept wondering to myself, why are we here? did nobody else find this 'field trip' strange?

i sat in the car, staring at this pit from the outside now, years later. still, i wondered about it's purpose... thinking of it as a source of essential building supplies, it seemed significant to me. at the same time, i couldn't stop thinking about the vast number of men inside the pit. digging a hole, forever. digging and digging, just as we used to dig on the beach as kids. "we're digging a hole to china!" we'd say. and later we'd get in trouble when, after we'd covered it with sticks and sand, unsuspecting beach combers tripped into the gaping pit.

there is a giant hole in the middle of town, juxtaposed with the hospital. the town is sick, and it can't be fixed. so those naked trees watch from their shocked position on the newly made cliff. they look down at the little trucks, and see the men digging...digging.. and they wonder, why are we here?