Digging Bottles with the Four Seasons Bottle Collectors Club in Toronto
 Unlike other bottle collecting clubs across the country, the guys at Four Seasons Bottle Collectors don’t just talk bottles, they go out and dig ‘em up. They’re dumpdiggers, and this club is the center of the subculture.
I was honoured to dig with them.
Thanks to the power of the internet, five people who don’t know each other very well went digging together on the 12th June 2010 in the heart of downtown Toronto.
 It was the annual FSBC Club Dig, and earlier last week all bottle club members received an email from Melissa the club president informing us that Carl was leading the tour on this coming Saturday. The email was short and exciting – it was an opportunity to dig bottles. The email also contained this helpful advice,
Bring your digging kit:
-bag to haul out your bottles
-newspaper to wrap your treasures in
-safety gear (gloves, footwear, and glasses)
-shovel, rakes
-lunch
-lotsa water!
Rain or shine...Carl is good to go!
Thanks Melissa
A summer bottle club dig in Toronto
We all met up at a secret spot and walked for twenty minutes to a time honoured location … that must also remain a secret. But when you join their club you get to learn all their secrets, and I joined last May. Technically I’m not even a member anymore as my $25 a year subscription fee has expired, but these good people invited me along anyway.
Carl Parsons, who leads by example, led the tour.
 ‘This month is my fortieth anniversary of being a bottle digger’ Carl announced at the top of the day. “It was June 1970 when I went digging for the first time.’ It seems Carl was inspired by the glass bottles and antiques he saw being sold in downtown Toronto.
There was a bottle collecting craze in Canada in the early 1970’s and in many ways that was a golden age of bottle digging here because prices were high and there were lots of good dumps just being discovered. ‘People were finding bottles everywhere in those days’
 The FSBC club encourages new people to join them on their dig adventures, and today’s noob was a tony digger named Mac which is short for Maclearen. When he took off his shirt everyone was impressed. He’s got both of the quintessential male tattoos – the thorny arm band and the anchor. I think it speaks to his Canadian Navy heritage. Mac was playing the new guy and dutifully pretending to be interested in all things found in the hole.
Another new face on the scene was a burly digger named Tex. We dubbed him Toronto Tex and he made us all look good. Tex really moves earth, despite frequent pauses to poke about and scrutinize the shards of glass and broken buttons on his shovel.
Dominating the hole was Indian Al Pothier who is just a real nice guy, with a great attitude. He kinds of reminds you of Morgan Freeman in his natural disposition. Everyone gets real social around a deep hole in the ground, and the conversation was punctuated by the occasional find.
What did they find?
Nothing of any importance was discovered that day. Unfortunately, it was just good exercise, but there is a story to be told here. This particular dump has been excavated one hole at a time for forty years. It’s been pockmarked by several crews and nobody knows what has been dug by whom, or where. Nor can anyone remember where they themselves dug last year, or the year before that, let alone thirty years ago. To make matters worse, the City of Toronto's own Parks and Recreation staff regularly come and fill in the holes which they perceive as a threat to wild animals and a boon to the homeless, and generally undesirable, so the landscape is constantly changing.
But there was pay dirt...
 There was a patch of the old stuff at the bottom of the hole.
Here you can see the hard pack stratigraphy of the original dump – we could have explored this section more and dug down and moved earth – problem is we had been throwing our dirt above this piece of ground and so that would have meant moving our morning’s work again… a daunting task,
 Every bottle uncovered that was above or beside this hard pack original dump was a ‘cast off’ to use Carl’s terminology. A Cast Off is a bottle that someone has already dug up and then discarded as being worthless. We found a half dozen sauce bottles and two of them were embossed.
In the hard pack however there was a chance of finding good stuff. Tex and Mac scooped away earth with trowels and claw tools fumbling over nails and a half dozen black balls that were made of something more durable than wood but were not glass or metallic. I’d call them plastic but it wouldn’t be proper. And bones and ash and it was good dump in that wall.
After digging all morning, and moving a ton of earth we were able to dig about sixteen square feet of good original dump, and travel back in time to the late 1800s in Toronto. There was a green sherry bottle and a blank medicine, but our trowels touched no treasures from that time period. Unfortunately for us there were no good bottles in the window we created, and to dig another section of dump and go deeper meant moving our morning’s dirt pile.
So that’s how the club dig ended. We said our goodbyes and promised to rally at the meeting next week. That’s where I'll probably have to pay my annual membership fee. Hmmmm
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