Why “Clank” Is a Bad Sound in the Landscape

April 7th, 2020

   I thought it was the heavy black clay that’s on the way to becoming coal that was responsible for the awful drainage in my new Pittsburgh yard.

Me encountering solid rock with a digging bar. “Clank!”

   As it turns out, it’s the future coal and a solid layer of rock lurking a foot underground that’s behind all of the sogginess and surface runoff.

   I discovered that while trying to dig post holes (in isolation) for a fence to address that other gardening nightmare I have – fearless deer.

   The wooden fence that came with the house was rotting and breaking.

   I was going to hire a fence company to replace it with a six-foot-tall vinyl privacy fence… until I got the $7,000 estimate.

   “I’m getting old, but I’m not that decrepit yet that I can’t dig holes and lug plastic panels,” I figured.

   So to whittle the cost down to more like $2,500 in materials, I got out the post-hole digger and digging bar and got started.

   The first two holes weren’t bad. It was hard work, but I was 32 inches deep in about 20 minutes each.

   Then I hit a root the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s thigh in the middle of hole three.

   Two hours of hacking with a hand ax later, I decided to rent an auger to drill the remaining dozen holes – and hoped that no more roots were lurking.

   I’d never used a gas-powered auger before, but in the YouTube videos I watched, these drills on steroids bored three feet down in less than a minute with almost no operator effort.

   Apparently, those videos were shot by people who have actual soil in their yards.

   Here in the real world, hand-operated augers are useless when roots or rocks are in the way.

   Then these machines can be downright dangerous because they suddenly lock and lurch when hitting any kind of impediment.

   Auger manufacturers know this because they include an automatic shutoff lever that hits your leg if the machine starts to rotate toward you, instantly stopping the torque.

   That’s a nice safety feature so long as the lever contacts your hip, thigh, or even calf.

   The problem is when the drill is down the hole to where the lever is at knee level.

   I was working my way down hole No. 6 when the bit hit a colony of buried rocks and suddenly locked, causing the bulky motor assembly to rotate toward me.

   The shutoff lever – with the weight of the motor behind it – crashed forcefully into the side of my left knee, kind of like a linebacker making a jack-knife tackle into the planted left leg of a quarterback.

   I felt a sudden sharp pain at this awkward hit. Two phrases immediately entered my mind: ACL injury and meniscus tear.

   Fortunately, the injury was just a ligament strain (I think) because I’m almost back to just ordinary, everyday, old-guy knee pain now.

   The auger turned out to be of little value in all of the rest of the holes. It would go down maybe a foot before locking again and again.

   I returned the mechanical sloth to the rental agency and went back to the digging bar and post-hole digger.

   That was when I realized how atrocious the soil situation really is in this yard – and apparently throughout much of western Pennsylvania. No wonder mining was such a popular industry here.

   At each hole, I was able to dig down 12 to 18 inches before encountering the dreaded “clank” sound. In a few places, rock was only six inches down.

   I don’t know if they were huge buried boulders or solid sheets of bedrock, but I spent hours and hours chipping away at the surface of it.

   Sometimes I could only get down to 24 inches before resorting to Plan B, i.e. cutting the bottoms of the posts and using extra concrete.

   After six days of slave labor, I managed to get the 110 feet of fencing and seven-foot-wide double gate up and in place.

   It’s all still standing and looking pretty good, actually. So far.

   I’m definitely not going into the fence business, though.