Digger is very angry at rich people. When in "Footprints in the Snow" he closes in on a strolling couple, what catches his eye are "the man's gold watch and his four hundred dollar Italian shoes." For most of his life, he has sought solitude in jobs supervising cemeteries, and he has been repeatedly chased off by wealthy people; in one case, developers bought the cemetery where he worked, and in others they made demands on him that he found unacceptable such as insisting he use a backhoe to dig graves.

From the time he first began digging graves until the time he finds himself back in Garrison, New York, he has treated his work as a skilled craft, almost an art form, in which both cemetery, grave, coffin, and corpse were to be treated with a special respect that only using one's own two hands...