The Pit

Dust. Noise. Truck drivers knowing our every move. The farm land immediately behind our home, land we coveted but didn't own, was being zoned for a sand and gravel pit. A 34-acre swath to be scooped out by howling front-end loaders, chewed into tiny bits by rattling, clattering rock crushers, hauled away by trucks the size of WalMarts. Armageddon, we were certain, loomed in our back yard.

That was 25-plus years ago. The pit (in the end, it was only seven acres) is still there, a snaking slash in the earth 20 feet deep and 300 feet wide. A few weedy piles of sand and some crushed rock are all that's left of the once-abundant aggregate. This summer's rain yielded swampy spots and a bumper crop of pop-eyed, bright green frogs. Someone's dumped a broken toilet and some piles of brush back there.

Call the pit an eyesore if you want, like the countless others that dot the Ontario countryside. You'd be only partly right.

Against all odds, we got to like “our” pit. Not the noise and dust, of course – both less than we'd feared – but the thing itself. Stretching northward behind our barn, it follows the path of the retreating glacier which, ages ago, left behind that rich vein of sand and rock (one of the many facts of nature we learned from the pit's long-time operator, who wound up being more friend than adversary). Visit it in on a fall morning when the air is clear and the ground damp, and the smell of the sea or an old riverbed wafts up – not surprising: Eastern Ontario was at one time covered by the Champlain Sea. Once, in a newly excavated area, we found thousands of pieces of broken seashells, the kind of surprise that delights precisely because it's disorienting.

The pit has long been our favourite dog-walking spot, a landscape that changed daily while men and machines were there. Strata of gravel, red clay and sand, some as fine as icing sugar, revealed themselves as equipment tore through the ground. Pyramids of crushed rock appeared and then vanished almost as quickly. One morning, standing at the edge of the pit as the mist played tricks on my eyes, I could have sworn I was gazing into the Grand Canyon. If we ever needed a reminder that life is always a-changin', the pit was it.

“How terrible for you,” visitors would sometimes say as a sand-laden truck rumbled by a few hundred from our house. “Not really,” I’d answer. The drivers were invariably friendly if we ran into them while dog-walking, and they, like us, had families to support, bills to pay. If I needed a load of sand or rock, it arrived free, an acknowledgement that we deserved some recompense for the disruptions? “Not in My Backyard” quickly loses its meaning when you build relationships with those who want some of your backyard.

The pit is now being slowly filled in with material from excavation projects around town. This year, some of the reclaimed area boasted cattle corn. Those frogs are doubtless worried. As for us, who'd have thought we'd be echoing Joni Mitchell's words, “You never know what you've got ’til it’s gone,” over a gravel pit?