THUMB-PUMP OILER
By:
September 2, 2025
Cross-posted from Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s story telling experiment GIVE IT UP. Earlier this month, GIVE IT UP mounted exhibitions of meaningful objects in venues around Kingston, NY… and asked the general public to help persuade the experiment’s participants to let these objects go.
HILOBROW readers, we need your help! After reading the story here, click on the response link below and share your advice with the author…
When I bought a fishing cabin on the Esopus Creek, the property was snaked with buried electric lines leading to a network of fallen shacks. Locals told me that a motorcycle club once used the land for summer encampments. Curiosity, along with my dog’s digging skill, compelled me to excavate. Digging holes is more fun if your dog gets into it. We found arrowheads, from the long-ago Esopus tribe. We dug up a toy piano that went on to be so well-loved it was played to bits by a visiting child.
My favorite artifact is the elegant Eagle-brand oil can presented here. The thought of giving it up has inspired me to research it. When the first horseless carriages were rolled out, buying a Ford Model-T came with a free Eagle “thumb-pump oiler,” as they were called. Dorothy used a similar device to oil the Tin Man’s rusted jaw in The Wizard of Oz, so that he can finally speak.
With the discovery of an unearthed prize like this, every hole dug has potential. Digging a deep flower bed, we found a Mossberg rifle, wrapped in black garbage bags, missing its firing bolt. A buried murder weapon? I recently dug up a Penguin soda can, which, with its two-tone logo, resembles a Penguin Paperback. Which logo came first, the can or the book? Dig a hole in the Internet and you’ll find out.
“Go dig a hole and sit in it” was a line my parents tossed at us restless kids to keep us busy in those ancient times before the Internet. Before the giant maw of the Web became a mind-warping place to dig holes to delusional depths. I dug this 1911 quote out of a Wiki entry about “the law of holes” as I searched for the origin of the phrase as an adage: “Nor would a wise man, seeing that he was in a hole, go to work and blindly dig it deeper.”
I thought of the unearthed relics from my backyard archeology as fellow travelers. Where did they come from? Where will they go next?
The night Pope John Paul died and supposedly ascended to heaven, the Esopus rose with him. My land became a lake, and everything that wasn’t tied down was swept away. When the water finally receded, the land was covered in a multitude of fish. The river took away and gave back. The treasures of others upriver arrived in my yard. An antique milk churn heavy with bird seed. A miniature red car wedged up a tree.
My own lost treasures will one day sink into the earth, to be eventually dug up by someone from the future I’ll never meet, someone who might wonder where they all came from.
If you were in Annie’s place, what would you do with the oiler? Please SUBMIT YOUR PERSUASIVE RESPONSE HERE.
All GIVE IT UP stories can be found here.