The Pit

Gene Sorensen had spent twenty-seven years digging the hole, and on the morning they opened it as a lake he stood at the top of the bank with his hands in his pockets and could not find the bottom.

That was the thing about water. He had known the bottom of that pit better than he knew the floor of his own garage. A hundred and some feet down, gravel and sand and the big cobbles the river had left there ten thousand years ago when it ran somewhere it did not run now, and he had taken it out a bucket at a time on a dragline and then a loader, for Helms, from the summer he was hired until the summer the company sold the ground to the city and told him he could retire or he could learn to drive a truck. He had retired, at sixty-two, and was sixty-four now, and the pit had gone into every road and slab and foundation in the valley for a quarter of a century. There was some of it under the street he lived on. There was some of it, he figured, under every casino downtown. Sparks had grown up on the gravel out of that hole, and now the hole was a lake with a name and a ribbon across the boat ramp and a man from the city with a pair of scissors, and he had come to see it because his wife had said he would regret it if he did not, and because he wanted to see the water once with his own eyes and know that it was true.

It was true. It went all the way across. Most of a mile of it, blue-gray, with a chop on it from the wind, and on the far side the tank farm that had nearly poisoned the whole thing back in the eighties, and the freeway beyond that, and beyond the freeway the Sierra, white to the shoulders. He had looked at that same view from the bottom of the hole for twenty-seven years with a hundred feet of gravel wall between him and it. He had never once seen it with water in front.

He had heard about it the way everyone had, in January two years back, in the flood. The river had come up over the New Year like nothing since 1955, over the banks in Reno and down through Sparks and out across the industrial flats, and everyone had been watching the downtown, the casinos sandbagged and the streets running, and nobody, for two days, had been watching the pit. The city had bought it meaning to fill it. They had said it would take three years. They had talked about pipes, and pumps, and what a lake would cost, and had drawn a park around the edge of it on paper and had gone home for Christmas. Then the river came over and found the hole in the ground the way water finds a hole, and went into it, and in two days, forty-eight hours, a pit that had taken him and a hundred men twenty-seven years to dig was full to the lip.

Full. He had driven out the third day when the roads were open and stood at the top of the bank, right here, and there had been a lake where he had eaten his lunch, with the wind on it.

He had not known what to feel about that and still did not. He had told his wife it was the river getting even. She had said that was a hard way to think about a park.

Now there were children. That was what he had not been prepared for. The city had graded a beach on the near shore and there were children on it, in April, in jackets, with plastic buckets, digging, and out on the water two men in a canoe going nowhere, and a girl on the far bank with a fishing pole and no idea what she was fishing for. The state had put trout in. He watched the girl cast. The line went out over water that was a hundred and some feet deep right there, right where she was standing, over a spot where he had once sat in the cab of a loader in July with the door open and the whole floor of the pit shimmering around him like a frying pan, and she had no idea, and it was not her business to have any.

The man from the city cut the ribbon. There was a little applause, the kind you get at nine in the morning on a Thursday, and a fire truck sounded its horn once, and that was the opening. He stood where he was.

A woman he did not know, his age or near it, came and stood beside him at the top of the bank and looked at the water for a while and then said, without turning her head, that her husband had worked the pit, in the seventies, on the crusher.

“Sorensen,” he said. “Dragline. Then the loader.”

“He is gone now. Four years.”

“I am sorry.”

“He would not have believed this.” She nodded at the lake. “He always said it would be a hole in the ground until the end of the world. He said they would fence it and forget it.”

Gene looked at the canoe. The men in it had stopped paddling and were simply sitting, drifting a little, the way you do on water when you have nowhere to be.

“I said the same,” he told her. “I said it would take them three years to fill and they would run out of money at two.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “The river did not ask me.”

She laughed, a short surprised sound, and put her hand for a second on his arm, and then went off down the bank toward the beach, where a child who might have been her grandchild had found something in the sand and was holding it up to be looked at. He watched her go. Then he walked down after her, slowly, on the packed new path that ran around the rim of the thing he had made and the river had finished, to see what the child had found. It was a cobble. Round, gray, river-worn, ten thousand years old, one of his. He told the boy it was a good one. He told him to keep it.

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