The Ultimate Answer to Kings

The wash ran five days ago – actually it ran twice that day – and parts of it still haven’t dried out which really says something about how saturated the ground has gotten during this long soaky Monsoon which I hope we’ve seen the last of.

And I have further evidence that the water issue at Ian’s place isn’t runoff so much as water percolating up from under the surface. Here and there in my stomping grounds are what some people call ‘springs’ – they’re really no more than seeps – and now there’s a new one not far from the Lair…

I’ve lived next to this bend in the wash for ten years now, and this was never here before in my memory. It’s been here all this month, and got a lot more evident this week after Sunday’s rain.

The wash is constantly re-sculpting itself – we live in what you might call a dynamic environment. Used to be there were two distinct channels in the part of the wash that flows past the Lair, with a little island between them that had been there long enough to grow thick with bushes. That island took a serious hit last year and is now almost entirely gone. Sunday chewed a new channel through it…

Another wet summer and I’ll just have a big wide wash to look across. Kind of miss that island, but everything around here changes. I don’t miss it as much as my big shady spot.

But anyway, I think that seep at the turn of the wash explains what’s going on under Ian’s place. There’s no obvious runoff that could explain why water is percolating up under his slab, but there really doesn’t have to be one. Now I’m thinking it’s just another seep, and my experience with Michigan basements reinforces my notion that the only thing that’ll fix it is to dig a sump under the floor and install a float pump.

…don’t act like food. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

Except of course in Massachusetts and similar places, where acting like food is pretty much the law. So how’s that coyote issue going?

Swampscott police said they got a call around 9:30 p.m. from a resident who said they were walking their dog on Rockyledge Road when a large group of coyotes surrounded them and wouldn’t back down.

When police arrived, they said they saw at least nine coyotes. The coyotes were scared off by the arrival of the police cruisers and the stroble (sic) lights. Officers escorted the resident and their dog back to their home without further incident, but police are now warning residents to be aware of their surroundings when walking at night when coyotes are most active.

Meanwhile here in actual coyote country I rarely ever see a coyote and virtually never while I’m on foot. And I rarely see coyote sign near where I live. Maybe it’s my bad breath. Maybe not.

Getting into frosty mornings and ‘wait and see’ afternoons.

The weatherman says that Sunday’s all-day rain was Monsoon’s last gasp. The weatherman said that on the previous weekend as well, so flip a coin. But sooner or later the rain has to stop – if only to turn into snow. Maybe this is that ‘climate change’ we’ve been threatened with. Twelve years to global destruction, y’all.

Not long before it’s time to prep the woodstove for daily use. Not my favorite time of year. In fact my first five winters, before I moved into the cabin, were so protractedly unpleasant that I got kind of emotional about it. Took a long time to get over that, but now the Lair is snug and warm for most of each winter day excluding only an hour or so first thing in the morning before the woodstove takes hold of the situation. Even then, now I can retreat to the bedroom if I’m feeling especially old-mannish. So bring it on, I guess. Winter will never be my favorite season, but happily it’s not the ordeal it used to be.

The rain started slacking off a week ago. Sunday and Monday it only lightly rained. Tuesday through Friday were beautiful; hardly a cloud in the sky.

Yesterday that changed. It threatened all day and rained hard after dark. This morning…

It’s mid-October, he cried. Stop already with the rain.

This was anticipated to be a quite short session, because…

…I only had three pallets in my possession and next to no old scrap lumber fit only for stovewood. So I broke up the pallets yesterday, and…

…cut them to stove lengths this morning. Got no more than two wheelbarrows full.

That brings me to almost three full tiers, or something just over half a cord of tightly-packed old lumber for the woodstove. More than enough for a typical winter.

Of course I don’t plan for typical winters when I don’t have to. There’s still a bunch of driftwood I hauled out of the wash after last year’s epic Monsoon. It’s stored at what used to be my woodlot, and I’ll need the chainsaw for it.

Exhibit A:

It hasn’t rained at all since Monday. Sunday and Monday it didn’t rain much. But there’s still standing water in the wash.

This never happens. I’ve never seen it in sixteen summers, except a couple of places far downstream where there are natural springs. Oh, quicksand for a day or two after a real heavy flood, sure. But visible surface water standing on wet mud for several days after light rain? Oh, hell no.

This was a wet summer but not exceptionally so. Last year we got sixteen inches on the year: In 2013 we got 17 inches in two months. My rain gauge says 10.8 for all of 2022. BUT in a wet monsoon most of the water normally comes in scary dramatic thunderstorms that mostly drain down the wash to who knows where. Almost all of this season’s rain has come in light soakers, and it’s been going on from June till October. I’ve never seen it last so long. So, we’re getting a lot more ground penetration than normal which is great for the plants, no doubt. But not so great for Ian’s floor.

Which, yes, has developed some big cracks that indicate not great things happening underneath. I’m surprised because we spent a lot of effort on getting things right before we poured it. But the dome is super heavy, and it’s on variable sand and rock, so…

I’ve been gone from the cabin a lot this week, from Saturday morning. Morning and afternoon I take off for an hour and a half or two hours, up and across the plateau and then up T&S’s mesa to take care of their dogs and plants, either using T’s pickup (while it rained every afternoon, since the Jeep doesn’t have windshield wipers) or the ebike once the sky cleared on Tuesday. In either case, Tobie had to stay behind. He complained about it yesterday afternoon: This morning he outright rebelled.

So yeah: Enough was enough. This morning we took the Jeep.

Which is all he wanted.

On the road to T&S’s to take care of their dogs this morning, we passed 1000 miles on the odometer.

What with the extended Monsoon and that little mud-related wreck we suffered mid-summer, I’d begun to fear I wouldn’t reach that this year. Happily I was able to fix the electrical problem myself but waiting for replacements for all the other broken bits took weeks off my riding this year.

I sent that pic to Big Brother when I took it – he did after all gift me the bike – and he sent back a picture of his bike’s screen showing almost 4000 miles. Showoff. 🙂

I got busy early this morning and have been away from the cabin from Morning Walkie until now, on dog- and laundry-related chores. Came back to a whole bunch of interesting comments concerning drainage. Alas, I didn’t make clear, for the benefit of those commenters unfamiliar with Ian’s Cave, the nature of the structure. Ordinary landscaping ameliorations aren’t going to be of any use here. Allow me to clarify…

This is Ian’s Cave. We built it in 2009. It’s a domed steel framework covered with mesh and burlap and a heartbreaking amount of rebar, and then heavily sprayed with Shotcrete and buried in sand.

That retaining wall between the Cave and the powershed is about eight feet tall. Before we backfilled it, that wall was as tall on the back as it is in front. See that discolored spot in the middle of the wall? There was a spigot on that spot until the (almost explosive) beginning of the 2021 Monsoon, when the area around it began gushing water. Please don’t ask why. Very shortly afterward the Cave developed a serious electrical short on that side of the dome, undoubtedly caused by water incursion. That’s the same side where I’m getting percolation through the floor right now.

This is the rear of the Cave, taken from the driveway that’s a little higher on the ridge we dug out to make the foundation. As you see we made a very serious mistake in leaving a dip between the ridge and the Cave.

On the right side of the structure, facing the front, water cut a fairly impressive gully…

…which in hindsight might actually be a good thing because that gully directs water away from the structure. On the other side, the side with the retaining wall where I’m having water problems, there’s just a dip filled with soft sand.

And I think that’s where my trouble is coming from. Instead of being directed away, water is trickling down onto and under the dome. Obviously, in hindsight, we made some serious mistakes. I don’t see any practical way to fix those problems without spending huge amounts of money which Ian has already said isn’t going to happen. So I need to find a way to deal with the results of those mistakes, and that’s why I’m not interested in fixing the drainage problem: I’m interested in installing a sump so I can collect the water and pump it in a safer direction.

I have a problem over at Ian’s place. Regular readers might recall that last year’s Monsoon caused all sorts of problems there. Basically, there were water incursions where no water was supposed to have been able to incur, and I spent a good part of that summer fixing things that weren’t supposed to break.

Now this year, I have a problem with water percolating up through the concrete floor. At first I thought it was caused by something I had done. But that issue was corrected a month ago and my wet problem is only getting worse. Meanwhile Monsoon goes on and on. I’m finally driven to the conclusion that – deep breath – I’m not at fault. Ma Nature is.

If I’m right, I’ll know when the problem starts to go away as soon as it stops raining every frickin’ day. And that will mean that there’s an obvious fix: I need to install a sump pump. Because if the problem stops when Monsoon does, that means water has found a way under the slab and it’ll just happen again the next time we have a wet Monsoon.

Now: I can borrow a perfectly serviceable jackhammer, so retrofitting the floor with a sump isn’t a daunting prospect. But I’ve never done it before and I’m unfamiliar with sump pump hardware built in this century. I saw them a lot in my youth, in Michigan, but both those things are far in my past.

So I’m reaching out to the TUAK commentariat. Anybody have experience with modern sump pump hardware? I have to make recommendations to Ian, who I’ll have to convince to pay for the hardware.

…if somebody offers you a cutrate deal on a steel water tank.

When I was a kid we railed against “plastic this, plastic that.” I’ve reformed my opinion.

…twice a day for the whole week.

I don’t anticipate any particular drama this time, though the extended Monsoon is causing an issue since the afternoon rain coincides with my afternoon visit and the Jeep ain’t got no windshield wipers. Also the driveway is narrow, steep and winding and the Jeep ain’t got no power steering, but we already worked that out: T left his 4X4 pickup at the bottom of the mesa and I switch vehicles before going up to the house.

Hopefully rain won’t be an issue, the forecast says it’s supposed to back off today and be clear all week. We’ll see. It’s been such a thing that there’s still standing water in the wash for several days since the last time it ran, and that has never happened in my experience. It normally soaks into the deep sand and at least surface dries within a couple of days. And Monsoon is normally over for a month or more by this time of year. I need to be cutting firewood instead of huddling inside afraid to get wet. It’s not even like this has been an outstandingly wet Monsoon: My rain gauge says just shy of 11 inches for the year, where it was half again as much last year. We have had only like two big storms all season. But it started in early June and has continued into October, which is nuts.

Taking the good with the bad, it’s also been the coolest summer in my memory, so there’s that.

Time to light this thing up.

Mind you, once the cold moves in permanently the bedroom heater is my bestest friend. But for the next six weeks or two months it’ll only get cold at night, and not every night, which just makes it a propane suck. Plus, traditionally it’s a bitch to light first thing in the season.

I think this is the first time since I installed it in 2017 that the pilot lit right up. I wondered if that would be the case, because this is also the first year where the pipe was pressurized all through the hot season. Finally got the plumbing to the point where it didn’t need some sort of tinkering.

Also, last autumn I had to evict a mother and babies from the firebox, and then painstakingly remove a whole bunch of mouse nest. This time I put a screen over the outside vent, and that successfully kept mice out.

In fact the closest thing to a problem…

…was remembering how to work the thermostat. 🙂 So no problems.

Except right now I’m letting it run to burn off all the accumulated dust, and it’s stinking up the cabin. But that won’t last, and it’s a one-time thing.

Nothing worth blogging about around here lately.

Some of you will remember this picture of some strange hunting partners at the end of my driveway early one morning…

I thought that was outrageously weird, but it turns out it’s a thing coyotes and badgers do sometimes.

Badgers are common here but they’re nocturnal so I hardly ever see evidence of them. Just this one that showed up in front of my game camera with his coyote friend, and one time early in my stay when the dogs trapped one in a rocky gully. That one was about half crazy by the time I got there, and the encounter didn’t end happily. My idea of a happy encounter being one where everybody walks away alive and well. I felt kind of bad about it but said at the time, “I’m responsible for the dogs’ welfare but not for that of the badger.”

It’s true, sort of. Coyotes are predators by preference, scavengers when the opportunity presents, but very adaptable in practice. During lean times in winter you’ll start seeing piles of undigested juniper berries that obviously came out of the south end of a northbound something, and when I first got here those piles perplexed me. What kind of animal eats vegetable matter it can’t digest?

I asked around, and finally from the lips of an experienced coyote hunter (there was still a bounty on them when I first moved here, which is a major reason they’re so polite around humans and human-owned stuff even though their numbers immediately rebounded when the bounty was removed) I learned that the animals depositing the piles of juniper berries were indeed underfed coyotes. He thought they ate the berries to fill their stomachs so they wouldn’t be distracted from hunting for real food by hunger pain.

And he might be right – but since then I’ve seen plentiful evidence that at least some coyotes eat juniper berries in season because they like them.

More below the fold, to spare anybody whose idea of a good time doesn’t involve looking at photographs of excrement. Continue reading →

Going out in the rain is something I never enjoyed, even in Michigan where it’s frequently necessary because life goes on whether it’s raining or not. Here at the Gulch, where rain (and lightning) comprise the only really destructive weather we get, I’ve fallen into the habit of avoiding even the lightest rain. And I can normally get away with it because rain usually comes and goes in minutes.

This morning served up an oddity…

…a midwest-style all-day soaker. And by 6:30, Tobie was giving me that look. We’re not going to be putting his walkie off till the sky clears.

Thanks to Generous Readers over the years I do have excellent though seldom-used rain gear. And this morning water dripped from it as Tobie enjoyed probably the first really wet walkie of his life. He found it strange but didn’t seem to object. At least not as much as I did.

Sitting around all afternoon, and around 3 Tobie reminded me that it was time for Chicken chores – or anything else that didn’t involve just sitting around.

He says hi.

And now we’re off.

I’ve gone through long bouts of insomnia for decades. Sometimes in hindsight the reason is obvious – example, when I retired Sister Creaking Springs my sleep immediately improved – and sometimes, like lately, not. So a full night’s sleep is a memorable blessing.

Such as the one Tobie interrupted at six ayem, a full hour past my usual rising time, with a well-aimed poke of the nose.

And he wasn’t the least bit apologetic. I daresay he’d been crossing his legs for some time at that point and can hardly blame him.