By: Selina Pedi-Smith, Pellere Foundation
I was standing there, pointy scraper thingy in hand, battling a hunk of somehow-still-sticky clay on the inside of the excavator bucket when the transport truck came around the bend in my driveway.
I couldn’t have been happier to see it.
The drivers, you see, are equipped with all sorts of perfectly shaped and sized tools for knocking dirt, rocks, and clay out of every conceivable dip and crevice on these machines. They have to get every bit that might become a projectile while hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour.
I did what I could this time to try and atone for the state of the last two diggers. Digging a pond in solid clay is mucky, folks! Thick sticky stubborn clay gets EVERYwhere. When the first rental period was up, and I upgraded to a larger machine, I wasn’t even sure *how* to clean the muck out. I watched what the driver did, though, and I tried to keep that second, bigger digger from getting quite so mucked up by cleaning out huge clods of clay from time to time. I developed a small toolkit of repurposed shovels and gardening tools, and long pointy scraper thingies.
The day that digger got swapped out for another smaller one (I was down to finish tasks at this point) I had almost gotten myself stuck doing one last quick thing in the pond and got it back up to the top of the hill just in time for the truck to show up. And it was pretty covered. There were two guys working to clean it off that day, and I was beyond grateful to be allowed to pay the cleaning fee, let me tell you.
This time, well…it’s been drier work this last week, and most of the sticky ick is gone. I was happy to clear off what larger looser clumps I could, and I would have happily kept fighting with that bucket muck, but then the driver arrived, and I was saved.
It’s not that I dislike cleaning (okay, I do dislike cleaning, BUT…) but I was also happy to turn over the remainder of the cleaning task to the driver so that I could return to the emails, laundry, phone calls, yard work, and paperwork that were waiting for me. Maybe ‘happy’ is the wrong word there…
So. I’m now digger-less. And I’m a little sad about that. I still have the skid loader, and the toothed bucket we got for it is amazing. The last of the grading and cleanup from all my projects over the last few months will be its own sort of fun.
Now… if anyone happens to have an E88 or similar digger just sitting around, I wouldn’t mind putting it to good use for you. As it happens, I’ve been thinking we could use some sort of homeowner excavation training opportunities. Just sayin’!
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