The storm that had been building and building broke with terrific force. It broke overhead, and it broke over the plateau and canyons to the southeast. In less than ten minutes the gully behind the Secret Lair belched forth a veritable avalanche of silt like nothing I ever saw before, and the drainage ditch I have so laboriously maintained vanished more-or-less instantly.
I knew that gully would be an issue before I ever built the cabin, and there are three lines of defense. The second, the low rock berm at the cabin side of the now-gone trench, kept the water away from the cabin and the chicken yard. The flood then debouched onto parts of the yard it had never before touched, leaving its cargo of rocks and silt as it fanned out over the meadow and made its way to the wash.
Every wash in the area hit flash-flood Right Frickin’ Now. They all come together at a spot just upstream from a crossing near D&L’s place. That crossing, and every one downstream from it, pretty much ceased to exist in seconds. Happens at least once a year, but I’m told this was a masterpiece. The principal road to the Gulch was now closed for the duration with Landlady, Ian, and Landlady’s folks on the wrong side of it.
They finally got in at around six in the evening over a secondary road that’s an adventure even when it’s in good shape. We had a truncated version of S&L’s Saturday Night dinner party (not all neighbors could make it) but the whole gulch is a sea of mud and not a lot of fun for visitors. So they all pulled out the next morning.
Meanwhile I had digging to do. The outlet for my sink’s grey-water pipe goes to the gully trench and had now vanished entirely. I found it under about a foot of mud.
Stupid Satellite Link!
Okay, I still can’t post pics. But if I could, you’d see an indistinct picture of mud with a pipe sticking out. All the time I was digging around looking for the pipe I was thinking, “Dear god, how will I ever clear all that mud out of the pipe?” I was saved by a peculiar accident I’m just going to go ahead and call a brilliant design feature. When I laid out the drain pipe, years ago, I trenched it toward the gully trench but fell about 18″ short of where I needed to be. So I glued on a coupler, then stuck an 18″ stub on the end, then buried the whole thing with only the end of the stub sticking out. Built the retaining berm over that. When I dug the whole thing out yesterday morning I pulled off that stub pipe, which was indeed completely stuffed with mud. But there was only about an inch of mud in the coupler, which made it extremely simple to clean out. So I got lucky for once, due to one of my famous half-assed improvisations.
