Therapeutic Dirt Washing

Hey Kids! I've been at the office for a several days washing dirt. Yep. I've achieved a zenlike state, watching the water slurp and bubble down through the gravel in the screens and swirl in lazy circles in the sunlight. It's mesmerizing. What I'm doing is actually scientific, although it really doesn't look or sound like it. I am taking large bags of dirt from a previous excavation and washing them in two different sizes of screen. This way all of the gravel (and hopefully artifacts as well) are left behind for me to sort through later. Also, I'm scooping off the floaty bits on top of the water with a very fine screen to be ostensibly used later for analysis--to discern what kinds of flora were there in the archaeological record. We'll see.

I am basically using a large purple plastic tub filled with about 6 inches of water and placing two square wooden-framed screens of different sizes into it and dumping dirt onto the screens. Then I push the dirt through and collect what's left behind in large paper-towel lined screens to dry--I'm reusing the towels every day, don't worry! It's fun when the wind isn't blowing things everywhere. I've noticed several interesting phenomena as I do this over the past few days. I've been wearing orange rubber gloves (they look lovely against the purple) to keep my skin from completely freaking out, and when I put my hands underwater the pressure makes them shrink up against my hands. It's truly a bizarre and weirdly pleasant sensation. If I put my hands all the way down against the bottom, the pressure is really strong and it feels as if the gloves are trying to suffocate me. It's remarkable just how much the pressure increases with only a few inches of water. It makes me wonder about animals that live in the deepest part of the ocean--how on earth did they ever even get the chance to adapt to that kind of crushing pressure? Biology is amazing.

I've also been scooping out the mud at the bottom of the tub when I'm done with each bag and dumping it into a bucket to be disposed of later. By someone else. I was originally told to dump the dirt into the planters outside the building, but that's just plain crazy. I started out doing that, but quickly realized that there wouldn't be any room left after only a few more bagfuls of dirt. When I scoop the mud out of the big tub, I let it sit in a smaller one to separate the water out before I put it in the bucket. Here's the amazing and fun part: as the water is percolating out of the dirt, it makes little volcano-like spouts in the mud. It's really cool! If you've ever been at the beach and seen the clams' and other sea creatures' bubbles in the wet sand as the waves recede, you'll know roughly what it looks like. Again, it's mesmerizing. I think I spent a little more time than I needed to letting the water separate because it was so hypnotic to watch.

The best thing, though, was the patterns left in the dirty water when I put the screens back in. After the first washing, there was always a light layer of foam on the water's surface. When I put the larger-sized screen back in the tub, it made little square patterns in the white. The amazing part is that the foam bits would stay in little squares for a long while, even if they moved. The little pieces of foam would rotate and drift, and even change places with one another, but still retain their basic geometry. It looked like an earth-toned mosaic, undulating on the surface of the water.

Ahhhhh, dirt. I've always loved dirt. Now that I've seen its artistic side, and spent time meditating on its myriad permutations, I'm even more smitten. Om.