I once acquired a black Labrador puppy that I named Molly, while I was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington. I went through many experiences and exploits teaching my dog Molly to swim and to hunt birds such as ducks. However, I would be lying if I were to say that everything was a bed of roses with that dog. True, she was gentle and loving with my daughter. True, she was distrustful of strangers. But she did have some shortcomings. Say it isn’t so. I’m sorry. I cannot. She did have shortcomings. By far, her biggest shortcoming was her bad habit of digging swimming pools in my backyard. Yeah. I know. Dogs like to dig. I get it. But her idea of digging went way beyond a normal dog’s definition of digging. Normal dogs dig normal-sized holes to bury bones and shit. Molly dug holes deep enough to bury a goddamn car. Okay. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Maybe the holes were only big enough to bury a human body. A human body including the casket. But I’m telling you, those holes were huge. Perhaps the whole digging problem was my fault. I call it a digging problem, but it was more like an excavation problem. That damn dog was as efficient as a John Deere 410 backhoe out in your backyard digging holes. What? Someone said they don’t know what a JD 410 backhoe is. Well, all I can say is Google can help. Scooping dirt at a cubic yard per minute. Maybe not quite that fast, but pretty damn quick. And when that dog started digging, dirt went flying in every damn direction. It was every man for himself. You needed to hunker down in a bunker until the dust cleared. Yes Sir. When that dog started digging, dirt would fly everywhere. It was like a regular blizzard except the blizzard was created using dirt. How did I possibly cause this problem to start with, you ask? Excellent question. Well, you see it’s like this. When I first moved into my house after I bought it, there were some huge tree stumps in the backyard. My house had been built in a new development. And it was obvious that the lumber had been clear-cut from the property to make way for the development. During my time off from military duty, I started to clear the stumps from the backyard so that I could plant grass, put in a garden, plant fruit trees, and otherwise make use of my backyard. I started with the smaller stumps first. This was long before I acquired Molly. What I would do is I would dig around the stump to expose all of the roots. Then, I would cut the stump free from the roots. Next, I would dig down under the stump to expose the taproot. Finally, I would wrap a couple of log chains around the stump and yank it out of the ground with my van. For larger stumps, I borrowed my neighbor’s tractor to pull those stumps out of the ground. Some stumps I was able to pull out of the ground roots and all. After I pulled out the stumps, I would simply fill in the hole left behind with fill-dirt and topsoil. By the time I acquired Molly, I had removed all of the small and medium-sized stumps from my backyard. All I had remaining were two really large Douglas Fir stumps. One was about five feet in diameter, and the other was about six feet in diameter. Needless to say, neither of those stumps came out in one weekend. Molly watched me dig the smaller of the two stumps out first using a pickaxe and a shovel. I labored on that stump for at least three weekends just exposing the root system. I had dug my own swimming pool in my backyard around that damn stump. When I climbed down in that hole, I had to use a ladder to get back out of it. I could not see out of the hole while I was standing inside of it. It was that damn deep. And I had just barely dug down deep enough to expose the taproot. Every time Molly climbed into that damn hole, I had to carry her back out. She couldn’t get back out on her own. And I had a huge mountain of dirt stacked up in my backyard from the hole that I had dug. I cut that stump loose from all of its roots with one of my chainsaws, but I could not budge it with my van. Even the neighbor’s tractor could not pull that stump free. I had to dig under the taproot and chop that free from the stump as well. Once I severed the taproot, the tractor was able to pull the stump free from its hole. Then, I dragged the stump down the road to a wooded area and dumped it off. I had to haul in six cubic yards of fill dirt to fill in the hole left behind by that stump. That was in addition to the dirt that I had dug out of the hole. Remember, Molly saw me digging that swimming pool. And it was one helluva big swimming pool. But that was the small one. That wasn’t the big one. I still had to dig out the big one. The big one took a month and a half of weekends to dig out. The hole was even bigger and even deeper and took two truckloads of dirt to fill in (about 10 cubic yards of fill dirt). By that time, the damage was already done. Molly’s training was complete. She now knew exactly how to dig the perfect swimming pool. And believe me when I tell you this. She practiced every damn day of the week. She dug, and she dug, and she dug, and she dug. Soon, there were swimming pools all over my goddamn backyard. Hell. She even forced me to put fencing around all my fruit trees to protect them, so she wouldn’t dig them up. I even had to fence off my garden. As I said at the beginning, her biggest shortcoming was perhaps the fact that she dug swimming pools. Especially since I didn’t want one. Not to mention five or 10 or 100. And every time my dog dug another swimming pool, I faced another exercise in futility, filling it in.
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