November 6, 2003

• Spring Improvement
  (UPDATED)
  

  
  

  No, I have not moved to the Southern Hemisphere, nor entered a timewarp.  It is still fall here in the formerly frozen North.  The “spring” to which I refer is the communal spring where our neighborhood gets its water.

  
  

  

  
  

  The shot at left shows my son Doug filling a water jug at the spring a little over a year ago, on October 13, 2002.

  
  

  If any of you temperate zoners are wondering why any computer literate people in the 21st century in the U.S.A. get water from a communal spring, okay, here’s my answer to that:

  
  

  It is good water, the best spring for miles around.  It is only about two miles from here, right beside the highway, easy to access.  Wells around here tend to produce water that is high in iron and other minerals.  It tastes nasty and is often contaminated with microorganisms unless the wells go at least 150 feet down.  Also, even now in the age of global warming when our climate is wetter and not so cold as it used to be, we still live on permafrost.  Water systems around here still freeze up in the winter.  Each winter some of my more affluent or civilized neighbors burn their houses down trying to thaw their pipes, or they deal with icy flooded floors when pipes freeze and burst.  All things considered, getting water from the spring is preferable for many of us.

  
  

  In the shot at right, taken just a bit less than a year ago, on November 14, 2002, my son Doug is filling a bucket at the spring.

  
  

  In the first shot above, you can see that he crouches beside the waterhole, where someone has placed a small wooden platform that slants toward the spring.  The jug rests on the rocky bottom and will not stand upright.  Buckets, likewise do not stand up under the outflow pipe, and the only way to get one full to the top is to use a dipper of some sort to transfer water to the buckets.  The little wooden platform wobbled and when it was slick with ice it tended to dump us into the spring.  All that has changed.

  
  

  I’ve missed two small water runs.  When I drive, we fill the hatch of my station wagon with all the jugs and buckets and get 50 gallons of water.  When Greyfox drives, he puts a jug or two in his car and gets enough to get by a day or two until I’m ready to make a real water run.

  
  

  A couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t well, so Doug and Greyfox made one of those abbreviated water runs.  They came back enthusing over the improvements at the spring.  They described the changes, and although I heard them, I didn’t properly grasp the magnitude of the difference, nor did I think to look that way as I drove by on my way to town.

  
  

  While Doug and I were in Anchorage last Tuesday, Greyfox decided he wanted to rent a video, so he took a couple of small jugs with him and filled them on the way home from the general store.  That was the other run I missed, though I can’t honestly say I really miss going to the waterhole in this kind of weather.  It has been cloudy, damp, foggy and drippy, not to mention chilly.

  
  

  Last evening, around 0-dark-thirty, when Doug got up (his 26-hour-a-day body clock having run him back around to the night shift again), we were low enough on water that I decided to go ahead and get a full load in the near-dark gloom.  Even by flashlight–heck, even by twilight without the flashlight, the improvements were impressive.  I decided I needed to document them.  I hadn’t even thought about taking the camera last night.

  
  

  After an interesting day today on my butt here on Xanga, Greyfox and I went to the laundromat to wash clothes and take showers.  Doug, of course, was asleep, it being daytime.  Now, he’s up preparing to wash dishes with some of that water we fetched last night.  It has been preheating on top of the woodstove in a big old green enameled pot (named Kermit) and when he has the sink cleared and the dishes stacked, he will move Kermit to the kitchen range and get the water boiling.  Food safety is one of the things we take seriously here, and rubber gloves are another pair of serious things to us.

  
  

  

  
  

  Anyhow, I took the camera along and got these pics on the way to the laundromat.  See that gloomy weather I mentioned?  See those spring improvements?  One of the niftiest is something I am not sure was planned.  There is a little groove next to a big rock where two sections of the decking meet (just right of center foreground in the first shot of the “new” spring, above), and our 3-cell Maglite lies securely in that groove, aimed right at the outflow pipe so we could easily get water even in full dark.  That’s going to come in very handy around Winter Solstice when there’s only about 4 hours of light a day.  Until now, we either had to hold the light, or try to make do with whatever light we could “bounce” off the snow from our car’s headlights.

  
  

  Another significant improvement is that the stony bottom of the waterhole is further from the outflow, so that our buckets and jugs will stand upright under the stream of water and fill all the way, easier and more quickly.  One iffy little thing that might turn into a downside when it gets really cold is the pipe that now runs under the path, carrying the outflow on down to the creek.  If that freezes up and the water overflows the path, it’s going to be a mess.  We shall see.

  
  

  So, that’s my story and those are the pics.  I’m exhausted.  I hit the wall at the laundromat.  No, not literally hit a wall, I guess that didn’t come out quite like I meant.  I mean the the CFS caught up with me like it hasn’t in months.  It’s so odd, how when I’m in one of the bad periods of exacerbation as my doc calls it, when the baseline of my function and symptoms is in the cellar, what I most notice is the “good” days of higher than usual energy, and the rest of the days, the ones where I just drag around and feel lousy, well they are just “normal”.  But when I’ve had some remission time and have gotten used to feeling good and functioning well, as I have all summer this year, those walls hurt more than ever when I run into one... but I’ll bounce back.  I always do.

  
  

  UPDATE:

  
  

  JennyG asked a question I had intended to address last night, until my fatigue caught up with me.

  
  

  
  

  Do people just take it upon themselves to do things like that or is it a municipal thing? 

  
  

  I have no solid information on who fixed the spring, but we have some solid supposition based on previous experience.  The governmental agency that controls acess to the spring is the State Highway Department.  Several years ago, they “improved” the spring.  The old corrugated culvert pipe that channeled the outflow (without which the spring would simply bubble up into the bottom of a rocky pool) had been rusty and dented, and was home to a thriving colony of moss and algae.

  
  

  A month or so before their work began, a sign went up at the spring, announcing their intentions.  They brought in a backhoe and dug up the pipe and put in a new one.  The spring was unusable for weeks, the parking area between it and the highway was torn up and mucky when they got done, and they destroyed all the steps we citizens had cut into the bank and removed the wooden platforms some of us had placed there for better access to the water.  We had to start from scratch.

  
  

  This time there was no advance notice.  The work was accomplished swiftly and cleanly with a minimum of fuss.  For everything that was taken away, something better was put in place.  I also noticed that some of the dirt and gravel that had been removed to put in the retaining wall of railroad ties around the spring had been used to fill in along the edge of the pavement where there had been a drop-off of several inches down to the parking area.

  
  

  The materials that were used this time were of the same sort that we and our neighbors often use for such jobs:  salvaged freight pallets and railroad ties, and the boulders that occur naturally in the ground around here.  I suspect that, had it been a government job, the taxpayers would have bought a bunch of new materials, the job would have taken a lot longer to accomplish, would not have been so well planned nor so aesthetically done.  It just does not seem like a government job, to me.

  • 3:11 pm
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