The Hole: Never Big Enough For A Boy’s Imagination

By Dottie Evans

Rain or shine, hot or cold, before school, after school, during school vacations –– it has been three years now that Tom Gleason, an 8-year-old third grader at Hawley School, has been digging a major hole in his parents’ backyard, and he’s not done yet.

Sometimes he digs in the company of his sister, Isabel, 11, and two friends, Jane Sclafani, 9, and Danny Sclafani, 11, and sometimes he digs all by himself.

Tom Gleason is not trying to find water, reach China, or strike gold. He just likes to dig.

“It’s all he wants to do!” said his grandmother Judy Gleason of Branford, with pride and exasperation.

“It’s intense,” agreed his mother, “and it’s never finished. The Hole [as everyone in the family calls it] is always evolving.”

Tom’s parents, Pam and Bob Gleason, do not complain about their son’s excavating project that has taken over the far corner of their domestic landscape.

“When Tommy is digging, he’s totally happy and occupied. As long as he uses his own tools [a hoe, four shovels, an entrenching tool, loppers, a pick, a rake, and a hand trowel] we don’t mind,” Mrs Gleason said.

“He shares it. It’s like therapy for all the kids. Sometimes his friends call up and ask if they can come over and work on it,” she noted recently as she led a visitor across the back lawn of the Lake Road home the family has enjoyed for the past 11 years.

As they approached the site, a circular rim of red-brown earth could be seen rising out of the green grass as though a giant gopher had passed this way, done his best work, and moved on.

Hole-Oriented: A Work     In Progress

Actually, The Hole is quite nicely situated, since it is set back behind the swing set and sheltered by a canopy of young hemlock trees. From the Gleason’s deck overlooking Lake Lillinonah, one would hardly suspect it was there. Up close, there’s no missing it.

As of the second week in June 2004, The Hole is approximately five feet deep and four feet across, and there is a painter’s ladder dug into one end wall so that older, less nimble friends and relatives can get in and out.

The sides are smooth and clay-colored (Tom calls the dirt “Indian clay” because when wet, it is smooth and plastic feeling). The occasional big rock and lots of tiny tree rootlets are sticking out of the dirt.

At the far end of The Hole, an open snakelike passage has been dug under a tall metal trellis that might or might not be moved depending upon what Tom eventually decides. This passage leads to a new hole –– a sort of annex under construction. Tom’s plan is to eventually cover this second hole with branches and dirt, and Isabel likes his idea of making four corners inside it –– one for each of the hole-digging regulars.

“We’ll each have a corner and we can decorate it however we want,” she said.

Tom was asked if he could remember what his very first digging project was, and his mother reminded him that when he was 3, he had made a little town at the foot of the deck steps and had started a hole next to it for a lake.

“But one day we were carrying a cooler down the steps and someone almost tripped stepping over the village, so we asked him to move it farther across the yard,” Mrs Gleason explained.

“Yeah,” Tom remembered, “Dad said the town had to be moved. At first, I was really upset.”

In an attempt to explain why he liked to dig, he said when he “was little” he used to go with his dad to watch the men digging holes and roads for new houses. (Bob Gleason, a lifelong Newtown resident, is a realtor with Century 21).

When he grows up, Tom Gleason said he might build houses, or be “a football player or a landscaper, or a guy who drives bulldozers.”

Until then, he plans to keep on digging in his hole, except maybe not in the dead of winter when it’s too cold and snowy to be outside.

“In the wintertime, my friends and I draw designs like architects do, and we talk about what we’ll do with it in the spring. Because if I’m not digging in it, I’m thinking about it.”