Thirty holes, looking for dirt
Before you can build much of anything, someone has to find out what you are building on. So we went looking for soil, which sounds like the easiest scavenger hunt ever devised until you actually do it.
The way you find out what is under twenty acres is that you dig. A lot. We put something like thirty holes across the property, spread out like a very unfun Easter egg hunt, each one a small window into what the ground is really made of down where it matters.
I brought in a soil scientist for this, because reading dirt is a real profession and I am not qualified to do more than get it on my boots. He is the kind of person who can look at a hole and tell you the story of the last ten thousand years of that spot.
He looked at a lot of our holes. Then he said, with the calm of a man who has seen many holes, that it was the absolute worst dirt he had ever encountered. Not bad. Not challenging. The worst. A personal record, and not the kind you frame.
I want to say I argued. I did not. When the professional you hired to evaluate your ground gives it a lifetime-achievement award for being terrible, you take the note.
And then comes the plot twist, which I have decided to simply enjoy. Page County's planning board classifies this same ground as prime farmland. Prime. The worst dirt a soil scientist has ever personally witnessed is, on the official paperwork, some of the best.
Both things are true at once, and that is the whole flavor of developing land in the real world. The map and the mud can tell two different stories, and part of the job out here is holding both in your head at once. We are not farming it. We are building on it. But somewhere in the county records, our terrible, wonderful, prime dirt is on record as the good stuff.
I have stopped trying to reconcile it. I just dig where they tell me and enjoy the irony.
- Around thirty test holes went in across the property, and a soil scientist read what was underneath.
Getting a crossing over the wet draw so the real work could reach the site.
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