It costs a little extra, but it’s worth it.

So yesterday evening the Secret Lair got its very own moat for a while.

Remember a couple of weeks ago I told you the boys and I bailed from the Lair to escape an oncoming storm, and it turned out to be the deluge of the year? Well, the flood countermeasures I’ve been digging seemed to work pretty well, so when it happened again yesterday we hung around to watch.

Ghost is still leery of the kitten, because he’s a wuss. I called him when the rain started, and he came right up to the porch and then pointedly turned, went under the cabin, and refused to come inside. He had about half an hour’s leisure to repent of that in privacy. I called again during a lull in the downpour and he came right inside.

There’s a fair-sized gully behind the Lair and a smaller one off to the side in front. What will probably be a third in a hundred years or so is currently nothing but some erosion slots in the ridge to the side, right where we dug the trench for the water line. That never showed any erosion before, but I’m afraid we changed the topography just enough for water to sheet down hard enough to bring dirt with it. During yesterday’s rain all three were running hard. So if we were ever to be attacked by vampires that would have been the time because the cabin was surrounded by briskly running water, most nicely carried off by water channels.

The bigger gully behind the cabin dumps its water into a channel that needs to take a sharp left to avoid the cabin. All would be well with that if I hadn’t trenched in a 3-inch sewer pipe to carry off day-to-day grey water in a way that doesn’t involve me stumbling over a trench all the time. When the gully flows, that pipe can’t begin to handle it. There’s some digging in my future to fix that bit, because the water right at that point swirls around like a backed-up storm sewer, overflows, and tears the hell out of the dirt I covered the pipe with. It also dumps all its silt right at the entrance of the pipe, with predictable results to the depth of the trench. That bit needs to be re-engineered. But the water nicely avoids the cabin, which is all I really cared about.

The rain slacked off after about an hour. All the little transitory waterfalls that had entertained me slowed to trickles and then died away. Show’s over, I thought.

Then there was a rumble in the distance, the harbinger of the flash flood in the wash. We can normally* expect the wash to run every year but it usually doesn’t amount to much. This time, for the second time this year, it must have been bank-to-bank on the straight bits because the water tore the living hell out of the curvy part near where I live. I’ve been hauling drifted trees out of snags for firewood, and yesterdays flood either replenished those snags or washed them away entirely. Long-dead and newly-uprooted junipers went sailing by like racing yachts. High, wide and muddy, baby, and I may need to find another route to drive because one narrow bit I use as a sort of driveway extension was roaring with water that probably tore hell out of the driving surface. No pictures, but pictures never do it justice and it probably only seems impressive to me because this area is usually so dry I can go a year without ever seeing any standing water at all. In Michigan, where you’re more likely to die by drowning than by dehydration, it wouldn’t have rated much of a look. But I was happy my little corner of the bottom land is still several feet above the highest bank of the wash because I want all that water to stay over there.

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*I don’t really know how normal this weather is in the long-term. I’ve been told the area has been in a really long dry spell, so maybe this year’s enthusiastic monsoon is more like the norm. But it seems excessive to me.