The excavation and trenching was underway. Aldo would be up at first light every day to take on the back-breaking labor. All the digging was done by himself, with a shovel and a pickax. The option was open to bring in a front-end loader but he wouldn’t take that option until later. For now he wanted to see how much he could do himself.
When the pit he was digging out reached about two feet in depth he finally hit solid rock. The rock was right in line with where the foundation stem wall would be trenched so it could not be ignored. The next day he went into town and returned with a dozer in tow and a jackhammer to break up the rock into smaller pieces. The first thing he did was to go at the boulder with a jackhammer. After a continued attack on the rock, nothing had resulted, tiny flakes were chipping off but the boulder itself would not break up. He continued at it until he was finally drained, having seen no results, and the jackhammer eventually overheated. The war on the boulder continued the following day. He proceeded to dig all around the rock and unearthed what appeared to be a stone almost spherical in shape with a diameter of about five feet. This was larger than he anticipated and the only option he had now was to try and move it out of the way. He wrapped a large chain around the boulder and clipped the opposing end onto the dozer shovel. With all the strength of that small machine, it pulled and heaved and weaved side to side, trying to wiggle the boulder out of the ground. With all that force, all the loader could manage was pulling the boulder a half turn out of the ground. It now lay in the center of the pit.
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