I told a guy where he could dig a hole for fun. Now there's a 28-minute-long YouTube video about it.

A long time ago, I went up to Hiddenite to dig for emeralds. I came up empty. But apparently I was just too far ahead of the internet's hottest hole-digging trend to appreciate what I'd done.

Here’s a post on Reddit:

Yes, a guy wanted to know where he could dig a big hole in Durham. Just because.

What is it with guys and digging holes? Back in 2022, Vice looked at the trend of grown men who dig for … fun? I mean, I’ve dug plenty of holes in my life. I help my kids dig some little holes on the beach (we fill them in, because you really, really should). I make holes to plant trees or shrubs. But I can’t say that I’ve come home after a long day’s work, cracked open a cold one, and gone off into the back yard to see how deep I can go.

(For what it’s worth, if you were able to dig a hole straight down from North Carolina to the other side of the earth, you wouldn’t pop up in China. You’d pop up on the soggy floor of the southern Indian Ocean.)

In the story, the reporter for Vice talked to Dr. Jacob Hirsh, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto who has researched the differences in personality between genders. He can sort of understand why boys dig holes. “Using one’s strength to achieve a personal challenge could be rewarding for anybody, but the idea of a strong individual who can gain mastery over their environment is particularly congruent with masculine gender norms,” he told Vice. “Something about a man working the land with a shovel appeals to a basic sense of rugged male individualism, a feeling that can be fleeting in our modern lifestyles.”

In short: Dudes rock.

Back to the Durham hole thing. This drifted into my feed about a month back, and it seemed like a pretty simple question with no clear answer. Where would someone be able to just go dig a hole in Durham? To be clear, there’s a lot of dirt being turned over in that town to make way for apartment complexes, new homes, craft breweries, and so on. But there seems to be no Durham chapter of the Hole Digging Club. Yes, those clubs are actually real.

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Some people suggested helping out with a purpose-driven hole, like a ditch or a rain garden. A lot of folks made jokes about Minecraft and Camp Green Lake and body burying. And a few folks concern-trolled the original poster, talking about the very real danger of collapse in a hole that’s five feet or deeper. Others, like your dad, pointed out that liability insurance would probably prevent anyone from legitimately allowing a stranger to dig a deep hole for absolutely no reason.

Nobody, however, answered the question. Nobody found a good place to dig a big hole in Durham.

So I chimed in:

Not in Durham, but a long time ago I went up to the Emerald Hollow Mine in Hiddenite and they had a dig site where you could dig your own holes to find emeralds. I tried it. Found nothing, but I got to dig some holes. It's still there if you all want to take a drive: https://www.emeraldhollowmine.com/diggin

The original poster replied to say it was a great suggestion. And then I moved on. I try to be helpful when I can, but (I swear to you) I’m not always out here strip mining the internet for story ideas. So, I just forgot about it for a few weeks.

The panning station at the Emerald Hollow Mine in Hiddenite (Photo by Visit Hickory Metro)

But earlier this month, the hole thing popped back into my head. I wondered if the guy ever went out and did his big dig. He did! He told me via private Reddit message that he took a day trip up to Hiddenite with some friends. And yes, he said, they dug a big hole. I told him that I was happy to hear it, and that I’d love to see some pictures if he didn’t mind.

He didn’t reply. Then yesterday, I found out that he’d done more than just take pictures. He created an entire 28-minute-long video essay about it on YouTube:

Folks, I’m old now. I don’t understand the youths like I once did (if I ever did). But I am very aware that there are very famous and well-known people who have large, loyal followings on YouTube. I am also aware that, aside from MrBeast, I do not know many of them.

Hence, I had never heard of Jacob Geller, who is prominent enough to have 1.3 million followers on YouTube along with his own Wikipedia page. I also did not know that he lives in North Carolina. And nobody seemed to know that Geller was the Redditor looking for a hole to dig because he wanted to wax philosophic about … holes.

But yes, Geller was the original poster, and had taken my advice to visit Hiddenite, which the video confirms:

This man called me a brilliant soul. I’ll take it. (Screenshot via YouTube)

If you want to understand Geller’s philosophy of hole-digging, you should watch the video. I’ll try not to spoil it here. But! Geller had been interested in the topic for a while. He wound up playing Minecraft and a video game about digging a hole titled, intriguingly, A Game About Digging A Hole. That led him to try digging a real-life hole in his own backyard in North Carolina, which was less than satisfying. He hit red clay pretty quickly, along with roots, which he referred to as “the rebar of the earth.” So he took up my Reddit suggestion, went up to the foothills, and accomplished his mission.

Jacob Geller, a man and his hole. (Screengrab via YouTube)

Geller and I learned different lessons from our digs in Hiddenite. He learned that digging a hole is hard work and requires some on-the-fly engineering, since the size of a shovel doesn’t allow you to just dig straight down. He also learned that hole-digging is satisfying, which I did not find it to be. It’s been at least 15 years since my trip to the Emerald Hollow Mine. I can’t remember if I’d brought my then-girlfriend or my parents up there. Or both. I remember I’d billed it as a fun activity. I can’t say that anyone who got dirty and dusty and sweaty and found nothing at all felt that it was fun. Mostly, it was manual labor. I guess I was just too far ahead of my time.

I did learn that there are far easier ways to find pretty rocks at the Emerald Hollow Mine. For example, you can just pay for a bucket of dirt that comes pre-seeded with colorful stones, and just use the sluice to wash way the soil until they show up in your pan. That’s the far easier option for the hordes of kids who show up in Hiddenite on field trips. I also should have realized that digging for actual emeralds on a hillside where many, many other people have been digging for decades was going to come up empty. One man’s current hole is another man’s former hole, it seems.

That said, there are legitimate emeralds in Hiddenite, mostly at legitimate emerald mines. They were first discovered by a kid in 1879 who was using what he thought were just greenish-colored rocks to shoot birds with his slingshot. That brought in a prospector named William Hidden a few years later. He wound up finding an emerald that was 8.5 inches long and weighed 9 ounces. The new type of emerald (which is found nowhere else in the world and is now North Carolina’s official state precious stone), along with the nearby town, were both named Hiddenite.

Hidden’s mine eventually shut down, but there have been emerald mines of varying sizes in that area ever since. One guy, a farmer and miner named W. Renn Adams, ended up finding a 310-carat chunk of hiddenite in 2009 and had it cut it into an 64-carat emerald called the “Carolina Emperor.” It was the largest cut emerald ever found in North America, and some of the smaller chunks were cut into gemstones that sold for $10,000 to $15,000 each. The bigger emerald was bought up by an anonymous bidder, and is now part of a collection at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It, along with three other uncut emeralds from Adams’s farm, were once valued at $5 million.

There are a lot of interesting things in the ground in North Carolina. Workers keep digging up fossils and megalodon teeth at a huge phosphate mine out east in Aurora. Mt. Airy has granite. People once found gold under modern-day Charlotte. All sorts of interesting minerals come from Spruce Pine, including the “sand” in the bunkers at Augusta National, the home of The Masters golf tournament. And it turns out that really big pre-dug holes can become tourist attractions, like The Quarry at Grant Park in Winston-Salem. You can also find very mysterious holes in the woods, provided you’re 1.) really into aliens or 2.) really high.

Hiddenite has mines. It has holes. And it still has emeralds down there, somewhere. If you go dig for them at the Emerald Hollow Mine, you’ll probably come up empty. But if you go there to dig for yourself, you may come away feeling something else. “The hole isn’t a means to an escape.” Geller says in his video. “It, itself, is the escape.”