Personal Essay: In an Open Field, Near a Gravel Pit

I had a wonderful English teacher at Brighton High School in Salt Lake City, Susannah Kesler. She was one of those special educators who cared equally about words and about us students. She took the time to review with me multiple drafts of the short essay below (which finally appeared in a student journal in 1982, Runes).

As I stayed after school to review each version, she was encouraging but demanding. She made me be accountable for each and every one of this essay's 773 words, weeding out the extraneous adjective and pinning down the core of my experience with just the right image, just the right rhythm in the phrasing. She required of me an almost religious respect for expression and for the rigors of revision. As I complied with her coaching, the writing became more authentic, more interesting to me. I felt connected to things bigger than myself as the little experience I was relating achieved focus, shape, and depth. I realized the joy of being a writer. 

What a beautiful thing it is to discover the poetry of prose, the power of personal expression, and the way literature connects people. The writing of this essay made as much of an impression on me as the experience I describe in that open field. 

Thank you, Miss Kesler.



In an Open Field, Near a Gravel Pit
by Gideon Burton

I used to walk home after little league games through the big open field next to the ball park. A giant gravel pit bordered one whole side of the field for a half-mile, and I would go over to the edge of it and stamp on the over-hanging earth that rimmed the pit. I wasn’t alone; there were always some other guys somewhere along the brim. Nobody wore a watch, but I bet I’d stay there an hour or more–lunging at the edge and watching the shelves of dirt crack, hang for a moment, then fall from sight,  cascading and avalanching in a tumultuous race for the plane below.

The field itself had many hills and slopes–I guess because it was so close to the gravel pit. Motorcycle trails were webbed throughout the whole area, cutting walkways through tall dry weeds. They closed down the ball park a couple years after I was out of little league, but I guess motorbikes still whine around in the variable terrain, loosening the sand, maintaining the trails.

A few months ago I went running in late evening, and I found myself walking home exhausted through that old field. I recall thinking I probably hadn’t been there since I was thirteen. A strange and different place this was at night–all quiet and dark. There were no houses close, and the absence of a neighborhood’s clamor and lighting made other things prominent: the stars, the scuff of Nikes against dirt, the wheezing rhythm of my short breath. The light breeze felt good on my heated body.

My steps led me to the indefinite edge of the pit. I looked in for awhile. There was no color–not even black–though the sense of depth was ominous. It seemed a weird and spell-binding void, a hollow and quiet schism. It was hard to keep in mind that this was only a pit where no light fell, awkward to have no perception at all, no matter how long I stared, no matter how intently I listened. So I spoke: “Then this is what nothing really is.”

There was no sight, no sense. I stood still. For no apparent cause, a single resonant rock rolled own from its slanted perch across the way. I didn’t notice just when the sound started. Perhaps a shade of changed air had moved that rock to roll, or maybe the imbalance of a single grain of sand. I wasn’t aware when the sound completely died away. No. That was no rock, just a distant voice being slowed and swallowed by the black vacuum. There was nothing in there. Nothing in that pit.

I looked around me; I began to take it in. And it all began to fascinate me–the sky and stars and things. Mountains at the farthest reach of my periphery–at the farthest edge of my sight–mountains, the elongated limits of the expansive valley that pushed them to the edge of the world And I am here, on this tract of unlit sand, somewhere in the middle of it all.

I was just gripped with this want to see it all out there. I didn’t want to stand in some field by some eerie hole of the dark earth. I didn’t want to be in this desuetude. I wanted to be part of the color of the night sky, or to touch the expanse of the whole horizon or to resonate with the silent voices of night. I wanted to see it, feel it, be in it.

I quickly struggled up the weed-covered slope of a nearby dirt mound. At the top (some twenty feet above the field), I paused to pick the stickers from my stockings and shoelaces. Then I stood up; I put my hands on my waist; I looked.

Nothing blocked my view from any angle–no houses, no buildings, nothing: it all opened up to me. There, high mountains–black, two dimensional, like a blank place cut from the sky with sharp scissors; yet real and solid, unlike the pit. And there, the matrix of city lights, like soft jewels set in darkness, spreading away like a plain of friendly sentinels. This is what I want. This is what I have looked for. I don’t know how much time went by.

I gazed at the open moon for a while until its topography became a real, as when I was a child–wondrous, and not strange. I closed my eyes, felt the light wind break across my bare legs and
shoulders. I breathed; I breathed.