DIRECTING WATER FLOW

Went out today with shovel and five-gallon bucket to work with water flow. The recent torrential rains showed me the channels the rainwater flows through. It flows down the tire tracks of the uphill driveway to the Caudill cemetery. In a big rain, the tracks become a river. I discovered a flow line I had not known or anticipated that runs down the walkway to the steps to the deck, flows under the steps and along a channel beside the house's foundation wall and empties in a big delta on the lower deck. Also, a thing that I suppose the "landscaper" took for a bridge. It's a dam. It directs the torrent coming down from the roof directly onto the lower deck, making a kind of delta of silt on the lower deck. I took shovel to the dam, dug out a bucketful of leaves, then dug some rocks in a place that needed to be deeper for water flow to run under the bridge/dam, tossed the rocks up the hill toward the place I aim to reinforce with rocks where small canyons have opened in the place where the water running down the hill from the flooded parking area is concentrated and eats away the dirt. I'll fill in the ruts with rocks. I'll use them to direct water flow as well as fill in the canyons. 

The rains washed out some small canyons in the driveway where it enters the road. Another place where the water runs down the tire tracks on gravel. A bit of a sharper slope increases the rate of water flow and it becomes a torrent in the last thirty feet or so. Over years I have kept the ruts filled with rock. It's fairly firm by now, though this last rain opened some new places. I'll fill them with rocks. Sediment that washes over the rock fills in the spaces between and locks them in place like cement. It is an ongoing concern in that part of the driveway. The rain washed some gravel into the road. I'll take the snow shovel and put them in the bucket. I'll lay them in the driveway in the region where the water doesn't flow so fast. The builders wanted to put gravel on it, when the driveway is excellent without gravel. The gravel washes into the road and eventually needs more gravel. Filling the ruts with rocks works. It doesn't cost anything and it solves the problem. To pave it would make a ditch along the side of the paved driveway. I don't want more gravel put in the driveway. It just washes away, no more than a temporary fix, an expensive temporary fix. Pave it and there comes a time it needs repaving. A paved driveway tells thieves that people with money live there. 

I'm building a berm to direct water flow away from the place it runs under the steps and alongside the house. The rain washed leaves, twigs and pine needles in small piles in my walkway. I'm filling the five-gallon bucket with this wet debris and dumping it in a line that is an angle to the flow down the area beside the tire tracks to the cemetery. There's no rush. A bucket a day. Then I'm lining them with small rocks to hold it in place while it redirects a river. I want to plant day lilies behind the berm. Seeds galore will fill them with roots to hold them in place as they shrink to the ground over years. In the years the berm sinks, the day lilies will be growing and multiplying. Their dense root system and the thickness they grow into will take the place of the berm and redirect the water permanently, better every year. I may encourage Dutch iris along the stretch where the water flows beside the tire tracks. The iris will slow the water flow and direct it back to the tracks to carry it on down the parking area away from the house. I need to do some more shovel work along the side of the gravel area where the blade on the back of a tractor left a wall three inches high that holds the water. I will lower the wall to ground level and fill a place where the water puddles with the gravel. Already have in one place. This will help the water flow on into the woods and not gather into a lake. 

I learned a great deal the day I stood on the deck in a rainstorm watching the flow of the water. Carpenters will be here this coming week, I'll be going up there every day. I'll carry a bucket load of leaves and pine needles from my walkway each trip. All I have to do at the other end is dump it. By end of summer some of the seeds will sprout and give the berms added strength. Next year they'll be about like speed bumps, just enough rise to redirect the water, not enough to trip over. Several clusters of day lilies and Dutch irises over the next few years will multiply into tremendous clusters to slow, stop and redirect water flow. They will hold the water to their roots, too, for times the rain is scarce. The Dutch irises transplanted a couple weeks ago are healthy and stand up straight. The mountain laurel transplanted is doing well. May transplant another. I found a place in the nearby woods where small mountain laurel are popping up out of the ground. It's easier to get all their roots when they're small and they're quicker to establish themselves in their new ground. I aim for the berm to work the first year redirecting the water and better every year thereafter. 

photos by tj worthington

*

   

BELIEVING AND LIVING

Oh good, the rain has begun. The green world is ready. A couple weeks have gone by without rain, but for a welcome shower one night. I went to Carpenter's house earlier to water a young mountain laurel I'd transplanted from the woods a couple weeks ago. They are hardy. I'm watering it every other day to keep it wet, give it a liquid diet while it grows new root hairs. The leaves are perked up and happy. The Dutch irises transplanted a couple weeks ago stand straight up like green rapiers, telling me they're happy. The large patch of wild violet leaves, out the window, flutter in random patterns, make a dance, bring to mind Philip Glass music. It's a visualization of his music, like the continuous flow lines in the films he scored, Koyaanisqatsi and the unspellable others. I heard him in a radio interview a few days ago, the occasion of his new memoir's release. I actually allowed self to spend $45 on the cd collection of Einstein On The Beach. That was when $45 was $45. Never regretted it. Haven't yet gone to amazon to see about his book. If it is under 500 pages, I may look into it. I'm still stuck in the middle of a thousand page Van Gogh biography, taking a diversion after 500 pages, like gimme a break. I feel like I'm creeping up on getting back into it, but facing 500 more pages is like, Lord have mercy. I've read six books during the respite from Van Gogh, and may yet read a few more.  

While looking within at the trails of destiny leading to today, I have a note on the desk to my right written on a piece of pocket-sized nobebook paper, "to see what you believe, see how you live." It has been here for a few weeks. I look at it fairly often, awareness it's there. I have never been able to answer the question, what do I beleive. NPR used to have people write in their stories of what they believe. Every time I'd hear them start, I'd wonder what I'd say, and couldn't put what I believed into a capsule form of one thing that makes a good story. Where do you start, and where do you end? I believe that if I cross the yellow lines in front of an oncoming car I'll have a problem. Haven't tested the hypothesis, but believe it. It's a belief I've gained by noting other people's experience. It's part of what I like about reading. I like reading someone else's story, seeing through someone else's point of view, good practice in awareness that others do, indeed, have a point of view particular to their own experience. Somebody I used to have lunch with regularly was convinced, by a belief about his point of view, that his was the only one valid---he's right, everybody else is wrong. A time came I was unable to put self through the torment again of my own volition, to take the first step toward the door. The people I know who read are comfortable with a point a view besides their own. Someone else's point of view tells me I share this world with others of very interesting points of view, if I can put my own out of the way enough to allow the other. 

How I live will tell what I believe. On the obvious level, when you walk in the door you see clutter. My workshop is the footstool to the chair I read in, watch movies in and listen to music in. A piece of plywood on the footstool is the workbench. Parts for things I'm putting together lie around in stacks, boxes filled with jars and tubes of paint, finished objects, magazines, books on shelves, books in stacks, a variety of pictures and African masks around the walls. Two of them are the real deal, three of them made for tourists. I don't care if they're all made for tourists. Some people are afraid of them. I believe they're good medicine. One has pointed teeth. It looks frightful to a Westerner. I've looked closely at the person it was modeled on in the mask itself and see a striking likeness. It's just a human face. The feeling I get from it is balance, so I think of it as balance. It is the image on the wall daily reminder of balance. I think the masks are beautiful, the purpose for having them. Pictures of Meher Baba on each wall. Asked, Don't you think you have enough pictures of Baba? I say, No. He has a great deal to do with my destiny. set me on the path to being able to find my destiny within, my path itself within. My work along the way has been to keep bills paid and basic needs taken care of. The way I'm living now is the way I wanted to live in my youth, but wasn't ready.

By here, I mean the place I see from, gazing out the window at the donkey meadow, green, the fence, a fly exploring the pane of glass looking for a hole in the invisible wall. He can see where he wants to go, but can't find a hole. I live simply. It doesn't mean self-sufficient. That's too much work, requires too much focus of attention, more than I'm willing to pay for something I can buy at the grocery store for so little. Growing it costs more than buying it. I know, better for ya, but if eating like I eat is deadly, because I didn't grow it, why am I not dead yet? I know the answer to why I'm not dead yet: science. Praise the Scientific Method! I live below the poverty line by choice. Don't have much to offer the world of money flow. The boycott of one says no to a belief system I don't share. Because I don't want to participate in the System, does not imply resistance. My form of resistance is nonparticipation. Be like water, flow around it. I believe television has wrecked American life, but can't struggle against something so big. I lose before it starts. I go around it and stay out of television, I don't like to infect my head with the mystery of the obvious, preferring a life where everyday life is not so obvious. The subliminal application of graduate-school Psychology is not guiding an ongoing effort to seduce my attention when I'm not watching tv. None of the books in the house are spun by the propaganda fear machine, nor is the music. No Tom Clancy novels. No commercials here. No pop radio. Only NPR for absence of commercials. 

photos by tj worthington

*

AT PLAY AMONG THE FLOWERS

native rhododendron

It is the time of year for the second run of flower openings. First, daffodil, forsythia, crocus. Rhododendron are popping open now,the cucumber trees in  full flower, the bluets in full flower, the heart-shaped leaves of the wild violets pull their stems tight reaching for the sun. The rhododendron are covered in clusters of a pink found only in flowers. Mountain laurel will bloom next month. Irises are beginning to bloom. Yellow Dutch iris are opening, the purple ones yet to open. I've transplanted a dozen small clusters of purple Dutch iris from a place where they were spreading out into a tire track where a pickup goes to drive through the gate to the suburban donkey meadow. The irises needed trimming back. I'm taking them to Carpenter's summer cabin where I plant them strategically to inhibit erosion. Somebody you find in the yellow pages under landscaping was hired to direct rainwater away from the house's foundation. He fixed it so the rainwater could only flow directly to the foundation. I've been doing damage control ever since. After a few years of being knocked off my track by what he did, I'm seeing what can be done for damage control. He put treated 6x6s around the parking area to make it into a pond during a big rain. He put a drain in the parking area that doesn't work like new after a few years. Water runs over the 6x6 rail creating ruts from water flow in the same place every time. I planted the Dutch iris clusters to slow down the flow of water downhill from the parking space runoff at the lowest point in the rail. 

new dutch iris bed and rhododendron

Already, I've put in a large area of purple Dutch iris that spreads wildly and some yellow Dutch iris that spreads just as fast. Irises, daylilies and at least a dozen Joe Pyes, more come up every year. I've found a couple of small mountain laurel for digging up to transplant. Thought I'd do it later in the day to give them the night to adjust to their new spaces before a day drenched in sun with torn roots in new soil, though the same soil, moved no more than thirty feet. I'll look after them with water daily to keep what they have left for roots supplying water to the leaves above. I get their core roots, but the root tips with the root hairs feeling their ways through the soil are largely lopped off. I keep them watered good, without drowning them, to give new root tips a chance to develop and begin their explorations through the topsoil. The ground is what I call glorified beach sand. My feeling is that corn was grown there for so many years, plus DDT, year after year, the soil was depleted. I remember plowing old man Tom Pruitt's garden. The soil was gray. The garden was in the same place since the house was built, around 1908. It would only grow things that grow in poor soil. He would hoe a trench for the seeds and sprinkle fertilizer along the rows with the seeds. This land the Carpenter's house is on has been let grow up into woods for eighty or more years. The spot the house was built on was naturally bare with a grove of mountain laurel beside it, telling me the laurel will take the transplant well. Mountain laurel blooms profusely in the sun. The big flower bed will keep them happy with light. I've planted only flowers that return every year and like full sun. Our winters are not cold enough anymore to keep tulips without digging up the bulbs, wintering them in the freezer and replanting them. Other people do tulips. 

flowering cucumber tree

Initially, I was thinking the vertical leaves of the Dutch irises would hold the autumn leaves in place, accumulate them, a leaf trap. It worked out. Rain and winter dissolved the leaves into the ground, topsoil, nutrients for the roots, a new layer every fall. Seeds are caught too. Small saplings rise up throughout the bed. They're beautiful too. I let them grow among the flowers until they grow three or four feet above the others, still easy to eliminate with long-handled loppers. I'm not growing just pretty flowers. I like to let the flora that grows naturally here mix in with the mostly irises. The irises will have their way. I like to keep it green. The Joe Pyes grow up to ten and twelve feet, saplings the next level in height, then a bed of dutch iris spikes sticking straight up, the flowers a purple only seen in flowers. I placed the iris clusters in a sort of diagonal line to deflect water away from the house, to slow it down and  hold some of it. I made a long berm of leaves and dirt to deflect the river of water flowing down the tire trails from the higher level with the old cemetery. Alas, my berm deflecting the water away from the house can only lead the water to the pond that collects in the parking area. It flows over the barrier during rains, and now has begun to make trenches. I planted the irises to slow the water flow, spread it out, collect and hold some of it. Another slope, the other side of some downhill steps, I planted with fifteen fern clusters last fall. They're all coming up but one. They will spend this year adjusting to the new soil and next year will flourish and start spreading.  

ferns at home

The landscaper who knows nothing about water dug a big trench and put boulders in it to catch water from the roof. The trench is perfectly placed for water dripping off the roof during a sprinkle. But when it rains, the water runs two and three feet beyond the boulder trench and has made its own trench. I wanted to put dutch iris along the new trench to slow the water and redirect some of it. It concerns me about the water beating the leaves to the ground during a rain. Thought I'd pick up some of the smaller rocks from the boulder trench and place them along the parallel trench to slow and redirect the flow of water from the parking zone and roof, thinking in time the Dutch iris will seed the new trench and grow some iris from seed strong enough to withstand the water flow from above. The boulder trench collects leaves and silt. I'm thinking the best thing for it is to let it fill up with silt and leaves and make a flower bed of it, more Dutch irises. Or a fern bed. Ferns and the iris are hardy and love this soil. The boulder trench is nothing but ugly. It's completely in the wrong place. It is in a good place to water a flower bed gently and have runoff below. Making lemonade of lemons. I had two banks covered in daffodils. The landscaper buried them all. I never think of him by name. To me, he's the one who knows nothing about water. I'm over the shock of his travesty by now. This spring I'm there every day doing something. I've seen by now the damage his landscaping has done, a good time to start damage control. Change a place from a lawn canyon to a flower bed that will send seeds downhill every year, ultimately to make a big flowerbed along the edge of the woods. I'm looking to make the place lush with flowering greenery that needs no mowing or any kind of care but trimming saplings and snipping a few things that take up from time to time. 

oak leaves opening

*