Karl has collected more than a thousand bottles from various sites. From tiny doll-sized vials for various "medicines" to big, burly booze tankers, each one has a story and a character all its own. Most of them came from sites around the district of Prescott, Arizona known as "Whisky Row," where infamous cowboys, outlaws and other wild types came to do their drinkin  and socializin with the town's "professional" girls.

Karl has found no end of liquor bottles, medicine vials and, creepily enough, antique syringes probably employed in the treatment of syphilis. I live Jerome, an old mining town in the mountains about 30 miles east of Prescott, which Karl speculated could yield some prime digging spots, since most of the town's original layout remains unchanged. He looked up my property on a 1910 map and found the footprint of a building that looked like a likely candidate as a privy site. After he assured me that the three plants I've successfully kept alive in as many years wouldn't be harmed, I consented to let him dig, and on a sunny August afternoon, Karl arrived with his remarkably simple set of tools: a shovel, a long metal "probe" and a bucket of small gardening implements.

The first order of business was to locate the privy site, which was suggested on the old map, but not definitively. For obvious reasons, the privy was usually located in a far corner of any property, as far away from doors or windows as possible. A small outbuilding in the back of our yard complicated matters some, and the first corner he probed yielded nothing but undisturbed or "virgin" dirt, tree roots and few cool old bricks. The other corner held a raised flower bed, which I suspected had been laid over the concrete that covers most of our back yard. Digging through the topsoil, Karl hit the concrete and I thought, "Well, game over. Thanks for playing." But the fun had just begun.
If we don't find any bottles, at least we'll have a good start on a bomb shelter.

With experienced ease, Karl quickly broke through the thin concrete with a big heavy metal stick (stop me if this gets too technical), revealing a hollow space underneath where the ground had settled considerably - a sign of a likely privy site. He tested the soil with the probe, which easily sank a foot or two through the loose dirt, giving further encouragement, and he began to dig.