I, Spade : The Life Story of a #2 Shovel

My name is Spade. Stan Spade, and yes, I'm a #2 shovel. The shop foreman wanted to name me Sam when I came off the assembly line, but his company attorneys vetoed the notion. Something about a detective by that name. Possible copyright infringement, lawsuits, whatever.

Don't look at me; I don't get into that stuff. My people are soldiers one and all. We go where we're pointed, get the job done, day in, day out, until our bodies give out and that's that.

Which doesn't mean we citizens of the Shovel Nation don't think. We've got minds, you know. So when I was asked to tell my story, give us all a voice, I figured, "Why not?" It's not like I'm all that busy these days.

Where to start...on the mountain, I guess. Ghost bought me in 1999, brand new, not a scratch on my steel blade, the paint on my fiberglass handle still bright yellow. He and Pam lived on a remote acreage in a little valley surrounded by high Montana ridges all around, and he knew enough to make sure he had at least one #2 shovel on hand when they started homesteading with nothing but a beatup old Chevy citation and a tent. Plus four cats.

And an attittude.

You soft-bodied folks may not know this, but shovels mostly come to life the minute human hands are laid on us. Oh, we're aware at other times, but we're not really involved. Likewise, we know a lot about the human holding us from the contact. I was new to the world, all right, but I could instantly tell this man understood me. It was a good feeling. I found myself promising to do my very best for him, every time, and also hoping he'd keep me around for a while.

This is 2011, nine years later in time and 1,400 miles farther south in distance, and I haven't been disappointed yet. Today, I was merely hanging around--rather, standing around, stuck upright in a dirt pile. Every day, when he hauls their slop buckets from the Border Fort to the outhouse pit, he snags me on the way by. Uses me to fling a few batches of fresh dirt down over the leavings.

Not much to it, but work is work, and I'm not complaining. Nine years for a #2 shovel, even one with a classy name like Stan Spade, is roughly the same as 80 years for a human. I'm happy to have any work at all.

Naturally, there's more to the story of me and Ghost, even though he wasn't called Ghost in the beginning.

We started out easy. With my new boss pointing the way, I leveled a bit of ground, whacked out a few clumps of grass and buckbrush, and sort of made it possible for the cabin skids to find a place to rest without putting the dwelling on tilt.

Then...the hole for the outhouse. Three feet by six feet, the footprint, and eight feet deep. We did that together, with a little help from Spud (he's a sort of crowbar) when it came to rocks bigger than a human head.

We did have a bit of adventure toward the end of that digging. It was right at dusk, the day's work was done, everything else was put away, and the boss was coming back to get me when he heard a rattler buzz at him from close range. When he grabbed me that time, I knew something was up.

Tell you what. If you're a shovel that's never had your blade lifted a good ten feet in the air, turned edgewise, and then swung down at high velocity to whack a four-and-a-half-foot diamondback right in half...well, Brother, you just ain't lived! Man, that was glorious! The busted snake struck back, bit those poison-dripping fangs down on my handle when I did that, but of course it did him no good whatsoever.

Ah-h-h-h. There've been some good times since that day, but that was the high point of my young life back then, without a doubt.

Not for long, though. You city garden shovels don't have a clue. When the wildfire hit, we were out there going like mad, batting down those flames. Once, for just a minute or so, the boss handed me off to Pam. She's not held me before nor since, but she, too, knew what she was doing with a #2. Turned over a little pile of dirt quick as a wink, then handed me back to her man.

I miss that woman's touch sometimes.

There was more than even that to do on the mountain, though, especially for me. We dug not one but two hand dug wells on the property. That is, I was in on the start of those wells, down to about four, five feet of depth. Deeper down, Shorty got the call. Shorty's one of those throwbacks. Handle made of wood, and he's a runt. Though I guess he didn't start out that way. I asked the boss about that one time. He told me Shorty started out as tall as any of us, but he'd gotten old, and his slivery wooden handle had been cut in half with a handsaw, then wrapped in duct tape.

Not sure I'd like that, myself. Sounds kind of like what the humans call castration. Better than being out of work, though, and Shorty did do one fine job inside those well shafts.

Anyway, when we left the mountain in 2002, my paint was still pretty bright and my reputation untarnished. Pam had gone to calling the boss Shovel Man, which he kind of liked, and that made me proud, I can tell you.

Maybe it was the name or maybe it was the wildfire, but our family started accumulating more and more shovels:

An old wornout warrior with a deep dip to his neck unlike any I've seen before or since. A couple of middle aged types and a brand new strutting fool, all with wooden handles. (Till Strutting Spade turned up, I hadn't known those were still coming off the assembly line. Thought maybe they'd gone extinct.)

And...Red. Red Spade. I never worried about the Woodens too much; every one of 'em (even Shorty, till he was cut down to size) lack personality in my book. Some say they're related to Al Gore, though I'm thinking that's a sore insult to the Spade family. But Red is a fiberglass-handled model like me...he did worry me some, at first.

What if I was no longer the boss's favorite tool?

We're running long? Sorry about that; we Spades have zero sense of time.

Sequence, though--we understand that. At the place in Anaconda, after the mountain, the work was shared between several of us. I did get the call to dig the hole for the new basement sump pump installation, while Red helped put in the fence across the back yard, cutting off those snowmobilers who used to turn around on our lawn when it was a foot under the snow.

Then, Colorado. Red, again, did the fun work, spreading 36 tons of red rock over the entire yard in Parachute. I cooled my blade in the garage...fuming a little.

I needn't have worried; Arizona showed my competitor where the coyote yips in the mesquite. Red Spade is a worker, a solid soldier as much as I am, but it turned out he wasn't as tough. The boss--now known as Ghost, after picking up that nickname on his last truck driving job in Colorado--had to dig some serious holes here at New Moon Ranch. Three-footers in hardpan caliche clay, for solid, treated posts that would hold up the TV antenna and, later, the water tower. If that wasn't enough, there was the trench for the French drain around the house.

Red's handle couldn't take it. Started showing cracks, right down next to the ferrule for the blade. Duct tape time!

I'm telling you, folks, I laughed till I cried. Would have, anyway, if my Maker had built me with a laugh bone and a couple of tear ducts. Guess we know who the King Spade is now, don't we, Red? Duct tape!

See, there's nothing wrong with duct tape, but when Ghost has to slap it on you, you know your glory days are over.

Mine aren't. When it came time to stucco the outside of the new house he'd built with his bare hands (that dude's nearly as tough as me, I'm telling you), it was me he used to scrape out the mixer on every load. ME!

Sure, I put on a little weight doing that. The Border Fort's got a bit of running water these days, but nowhere near enough to waste on something like rinsing a shovel blade clean. So yeah, there's maybe a pound of concrete stucco dried onto my blade.

Or was. Ghost just heard me mention that, whacked me against some rocks a few times. Probably no more than an ounce or two left to drop, if he decides to put me on a concrete-free diet for a while.

How long do I have left? No way to tell. One thing I can tell you, though. The Monument Fire roared its scary bad self through the Huachuca Mountains in June. Didn't come here, but we thought it might, and I was ready. Ghost and I were ready. Water? We don't need no steenking water! Me big bad firefighting shovel! Kill fire!

My name is Stan Spade. I'm a #2 shovel, and--so far--this is my story.

Fellow Hubber drbj (see comments below) asked, "Is there a #1 shovel?"

Yes, there is. They're not supposed to be that common, but guess what? I just lined our five most well used "digging shovels" up side by side, whipped out the tape measure, and discovered anew that things aren't always what they seem. Supposedly, the most common shovel blade size, the #2, measures 9" wide by 12" long, while the #1 comes in at 3/4" smaller in either dimension. In actual practice, it looks like those numbers, like true dimensional measurements for lumber, are a thing of the past.

Only the old warrior (far left in the photo below) measures 9" by 12" and is therefore a "true #2".

The next two, moving to the right, are sized identically at 8" by 10.75", making them both smaller than a true #1. (The one with all the duct tape is Shorty Spade, hero of two hand dug wells in Montana.)

Next we have Stan Spade of the faded yellow handle and author of the story. It turns out he's been living as a #2 shovel under false pretenses. His blade is 8.50" wide (1/4" wider than a true #1 yet still 1/2" narrower than a true #2) and 11.25" long...which is the exact length of a true #1. That's correct; Stan Spade, superhero, is actually nothing more than a slightly puffed up #1 shovel with little shovel syndrome!

Man. Don't anybody tell him, please. Any true #2 would be proud to have lived the life he's lived.

Now, last but not least, on the far right: Red Spade. His blade is 8.25" wide (true #1) by 12" long (true #2), making him a clear #1-#2 hybrid.

Huh. As one of my least favorite classmates used to say, you learn something new every day. As in so many other areas these days, we done been downsized and didn't even know it.