Then, all at once, the surface gave. Has anyone done work in this yard recently? Digging of any kind, landscaping, utility work, anything. Not since 2019. We had a new gas line put in along the front of the property.
Any areas of the yard that have felt soft underfoot lately, or spots where water was collecting after rain, she thought about it, pointed toward the far corner near the garage. Over there sometimes stays wet a couple days longer than the rest of the yard after it rains. I looked at where she was pointing. Then I looked at the sinkhole. Then I looked back at the garage.
There was a straight line between them. Not obvious, but it was there. I'll bring in fill dirt and get this closed up. But before I do, I want to check something. Is there a crawl space under the house or access to any underground utilities from inside?
There's no crawl space. This is slab construction. She paused. Why? Just want to make sure we're not filling over something active.
If there's a drainage line down there that's still moving water, filling the hole just pushes the problem somewhere else. It'll collapse again in 6 months, maybe worse. She looked at the sinkhole for a long moment. Do what you need to do. I drove back to the supply yard, loaded up the truck with filled dirt and aggregate, and made two calls while I was at it.
One to my buddy Rick who does underground utility work and one to the county infrastructure line to ask about old drainage records for Alderton Road. Rick didn't answer. The county put me on hold for 11 minutes and then told me the digital records only went back to 1987 and anything older was in paper archives that weren't indexed. I went back to Claire's. It was just past 10:00 in the morning by then.
October sun was low and pale, cutting through the oaks at an angle that made everything look like it was edged in copper. Clare had gone back inside. I could see her through the kitchen window, moving around doing things. I set up a tarp near the hole, started mixing the fill material and got to work. This is the part of the job that people don't talk about.
The part that's just physical shovel in, lift, dump, pack, shovel in, lift, dump, pack. Your body finds the rhythm and your mind starts to wander. You start thinking about the estimate you have to write up for the Kowalsski job on Thursday or whether your truck needs new rear shocks or what you're going to have for lunch. You stop paying attention to the ground. That's when it happens.
My shovel hit something on the third scoop down. The sound was wrong. Phil dirt hitting old soil sounds a certain way. A dull muffled thunk. This was sharp, metallic, the kind of sound that travels up through the handle and into your palms and tells your hands to stop before your brain even processes it.
I stopped. I pulled the shovel back and looked down into the hole. I couldn't see anything in the disturbed dirt, but I'd heard it. I knew I'd heard it. I switched to my tel and started clearing away the loose soil from the bottom and left side of the hole.
Slowly, carefully, I found it, a corner first, then an edge. Then enough of a surface that I could see what I was looking at. A metal box buried at the base of the sinkhole, maybe 14 in long, 10 in wide. The metal was rusted along the seams, but the body of it looked solid. Someone had wrapped it in what might have once been a plastic trash bag.