I was not aware of how others would see my developing hobby. Myself, I took it originally as just something to do one summer, an idle that then lasted into fall and winter and spring, and by its second summer had become a habit, and with another summer a pastime, and then with yet another summer a hobby. I had backed unthinkingly into being an enthusiast.

 

Dad indulgently allowed me to store my collection of holes in the back corner of the barn where the tractor that I have never seen run lies in its dignified ruin. You can stack a lot of small holes in the corner of a barn, if the outer walls and inner divide happen to line up happily enough. Holes do not really take up all that much space.

 

Everyone who knew about it at the beginning thought it strange that I would go out specifically hunting holes. But there are people at that age who collect stamps, or collect rocks, or collect baseball cards. A thing to collect is simply a thing to collect:  the physics of collection is the active part: the item that is collected is the unimportant partner.. Activity, activity, activity – not numbers.

 

And, soon enough, with the world’s wider discovery of my penchant, what was in me an oddity became a practicality. Dad was happier with my interest every time he cut the grass, and found one or two holes less in the lawn to trip up his boastful John Deere riding lawn tractor. I took care of the laundry-tripping holes around the clothesline, and got Mom on my good side. That seems to be why they never complained about how much of the barn was becoming taken up with stacks and stacks of holes.

 

Eventually, the county maintenance authority asked if I could collect holes from the uneasily crumbling asphalt roads and I agreed that I might give it a try. In reality, I had already collected a few holes from the lane-and-a-half paved road that ran often unnoticed on the left side of our property down to the old sharecropper community. These proud holes come up cleanly and could be folded out of macadam just as easily as out of sod or dirt tracks. But I did not want the county to think they could just stay quiet and believe that I would, in my exuberance, eventually set about collecting the holes that they would have had to otherwise plug with more tiring asphalt. Not that they were ever going to pay me, but at least they might appreciate me in idle moments if they had to openly ask for my assistance.

 

The outcome of the county wishing me to focus on saving them money by paying attention to the roads is that holes in a flat road cannot hide. It is easy to see them from a way off. Motorists bang into them once or twice and then put it on their calendars to let me know about the roadway’s inconvenient discontinuity. Holes in county asphalt hunt you, you do not have to hunt them.

 

After I not far later started harvesting holes from sheet metal, I had to establish quality control. There is a lot of stray sheet metal around here – old rusted roof parts; the fenders of cars whose owners believe that, against all terrestrial intelligence, might one day run again; metal drums; the blades to indescribable machinery; all sorts of things either useful or abandoned everywhere in a rural community. If I let them do it, the county would have me pulling holes out of speed limit signs that locals have shot to sieves with their target rifles. I could make this a full-time job, though no one would ever pay me for it. I haven’t the head to find some way of monetizing the act, to convince holders of holes that they ought to pay by the width or diameter or depth of the hole to have it completely removed.  They would rather keep the hole, pay later to fill it, or scrap the object around the hole, replace the complete object vice fix its failings.

 

Sadly, collecting holes will never be a profession:  it is far too specialized. But what a wonderful hobby it can be for the diligent, the sufficiently skillful, the discerning.

 

And simply collecting the holes is not the point of it. The object of the endeavor, once you whet your honor on the methods and means of collecting holes, is to get the finest, the most noble of holes. You want a collection of breadth, variance:  common holes, as the collector matures, slowly losing sway to rare and difficult holes. Holes that have their own dignity and species. Holes with a pedigree. Holes that quiver with the regal. Holes whose beginnings harbor stories that can be argued from clues and angles and edges.

 

So, I collect whatever leaves me in peace with the community, and place the best in the barn, put the ordinary holes I feel obliged by community expectation to collect into what has become a pit at the far end of the back field.

 

That pit grows each day as more holes are tossed without worth into the yowling dark populating it. Dad tries not to get too near the edge, as though it were an active thing that might draw him in. He does not complain that a growing spot of his precious land is no longer arable – in fact, is no longer there. It is one large hole, made of a congress of common holes that do not match up to the standards of a fine collector, a connoisseur, someone who over time has developed a taste and feel for holes, for the best of holes. For holes that matter.

 

And I don’t think Dad is the only one to imagine in the silent parts of the night what brazenly useful things I might soon be able to do with all the fine and elaborate holes I have collected, now that even the discarded ones have made a slithering pit that troubles him to the depth of the blackness quietly centered within him. I can dream of him turning with ever so bare discomfort, pulling the sheets to his ears, in half sleep pondering whether the pit he harbors privately within him has more in common with the darkness of the discards in the pit, or if possibly deeper within him still gleams something a bit more unique and chillingly collectible. 

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Ken Poyner’s collections of brief fictions, “Constant Animals”, “Avenging Cartography”, “Revenge of the House Hurlers”, and “Engaging Cattle”; and poetry, ”The Book of Robot” and “Victims of a Failed Civics”; can be located at Amazon, most online booksellers, and through links at www.barkingmoosepress.com. He spent 33 years in information system management, is married to a world record holding female powerlifter, and has a family of several cats and betta fish.  Individual works have appeared in Café Irreal, Analog, Danse Macabre, The Cincinnati Review, and several hundred other places.

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