Monday, March 22, 2010


A 6' Hole

The weather here has been unseasonably warm which has permitted us to move forward with some of our larger goals. I had called the county soil and water department to talk over a perc test a month ago (for the houses) and they had warned me about saturated March soils and tests failing that would have passed a few weeks later. But there was just something so enticing about digging an enormous hole, seeing if it would perc and then if it did, getting to proceed weeks ahead of our best case scenario schedule. The weather had been so compelling I called the county on Friday and the guy called back and spoke to Garth. When he heard we had no tractor he encouraged Garth to wait. When I heard that, I went inside and called him back and told him that we had nothing better to do and asked if he could come by in the afternoon. It was around 10:30 am and he told us, 'Just dig it big enough to get my chubby body in there. If you can't get more than 5 ft, don't worry about it. If all you can get is just 4 ft... if you can only dig 3.5 ft... just dig until you're angry enough and give it a rest.' His expectations were not very high. Well, dig we did. We dug for about three hours before getting in the neighborhood of a 6 ft hole. He came by in the afternoon and began by asking Garth if I was as persistent in every area of life. Garth replied in the affirmative through a grin and we went straight to the hole with the guy's scientific implements in tow (two wooden sticks with two nails in each, a timer, and about 30 gallons of water). Well, he was so impressed with our hole. He said that the guys with the machines never leave him a step, let alone two, and lots of them don't even get as deep as we did. What made us even happier though, was that our land dazzled and amazed him with its middle of March perc-ing ability. Hallelujah! NO effort was lost! To the septic engineer!

-Alanna

4 comments:

  1. That hole is GLORIOUS. Well done!

    p.s. I bet you could cram any number of maremmas in there and no one would ever know.

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  2. Shoot! we should have thought of that. We should run everything by you before we act on our inferior ideas. "Hey Ben, we are about to fill in a six foot hole. Is there anything we should put down there before we do it?"

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  3. I was pleasantly surprised that you didn't stumble upon a human skeleton during your excavation.

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  4. I would not have been surprised if we'd unearthed some sort of skeleton. It has slowly sunk in that we are in for a multi-year exorcism. So long as no Maremmas come at us with heads spinning 360 degrees I think I'll be able to deal...

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