Short Story: Bert Yurt

Short Story: Bert Yurt

Bert Yurt dug dirt. One night when he was four, he dug up his mother’s tiny flower garden with a teaspoon. As the sun rose, his mother cried, “Oh, Bert, what will I do with you?”

Bert looked up with his eyes bright, “Get me a bigger garden.”

By the time Bert was six his family had moved into a small little house in the suburbs. One morning as the sun came over the horizon, Bert went into the backyard and dug a hole straight down. He dug through breakfast time, lunch time, and into the late afternoon. At sunset his dad hollered down to him, “Come up, Bert.” But Bert was so deep down that he couldn’t climb out. His dad lowered a rope to him and pulled him back up. “What will I ever do with you?” he shouted.

And Bert thought long and hard on this. That night while his family was sleeping, he tiptoed into the kitchen and gathered up all of the soup spoons. He tiptoed silently into the moonlight, lowered himself down, and dug a tunnel under the house. At dawn his parents called frantically down to him, but by then, Bert was already digging upward toward the road. By midday he’d dug a tunnel straight up to the mailbox. The mailman handed down the mail to him and Bert crawled back under the house and hauled himself out on the rope.

His parents clasped their faces in wonder, but by the next year, they bought him a farm. By this time Bert was heavy into tablespoons. One day he dug up a great wide field of potatoes. His parents stood in the setting sun and cried, “Oh, Bert, what’s bigger than a field of potatoes?”

How Bert’s eyes shone. They reflected straight into that setting sun. “A mountain!” he cried.

And as luck would have it, directly across the field from them, there was a mountain. A great huge mountain of green earth and rocks and trees and before his folks knew what had happened, Bert tunneled straight through the mountain and came out on the other side. “What have you done, Bert?” they hollered.

But then the railroad people came to see them. “If you widen your tunnel,” they said, “we could slide our train through.”

So Bert went straight to work with knives and forks and great huge ladle spoons. And soon the tunnel was wide enough so that the train sped through it with whistles blowing. And just as the sun set, Bert stood proudly in his dug up farmyard and waved to all the passengers in the windows. Mom and Dad stood proudly beside their little son and waved there with him, but they waved in silence. They were afraid to ask Bert what might be bigger than a mountain.