Backfill Blues

August 2, 2013

Despite the fact that it’s actually August now and I left Greece almost a week ago… let’s pretend that it’s a week and a half ago.  A week and a half ago I was still in Greece and we were hurrying to finish our trench before the dreaded “backfill day.”  Backfill day is when you put all the dirt that you spent all summer digging out of the ground back into the ground.  Sound painful?  Well, it is.  After spending a whole day removing a clay layer that proved to be a gigantic pain in the ass, at noon we promptly began refilling our trench.  Lucky for us we only had to refill what I had started to call “the pit of despair,” on account of its depth (almost a meter deeper than the rest of the trench due to the topography) and danger to tourists (dang tourists are always falling into trenches, apparently). 

Once we were instructed to put down our picks and grab shovels and buckets we all formed a chain gang line of shovelers, bucket carriers, bucket dumpers, and dirt rakers.  Trenches converged as people from other areas of the site came to help fill our trench and later we helped fill theirs, as well. 

It’s extremely depressing covering up something you’ve worked so hard to expose, and even worse – worked so hard to clean!  If you’ve never cleaned jagged bedrock with a shitty handbroom that’s worn down to its nubs, you will never understand.  It would take forever with proper tools, let alone crappy ones.  Anyway, needless to say, it was a rather sad day. 

HOWEVER, the thing that made backfill day AMAZING was the site director saying “EVERYONE IN THE TRENCH!” about every fifteen minutes after a flurry of bucket dumping.  Why everyone in the trench?  So we could jump around, of course!  (See awesome video below… which I will probably have to post later because the internet at my hostel in Munich stinks!)  For about a minute each time everyone jumped for as long as they could in order to pack down the loose soil in the trench.  And since I’m a Badger, this not only made me feel right at home, but also SO MUCH BETTER!  Backfill day proves that you can turn anything around and find something fun in it.  

More on leaving Greece and exploring Germany soon!