The ducklings that arrived May 2
are suddenly gangly teenagers.
Archive for the 'time' Category
In early April, this debris flow was liquid and the wall of the irrigation ditch was cut to allow the material to keep moving downhill.
A month later, the ditch wall is finally repaired, the ditch is filling, and there’s a plan. I got the scoop from an engineer who worked for the ditch company, which had come to an agreement with the landowner, the county and the Army Corps of Engineers.
This is the problem: a big chunk of the cliffs at the top of this mountain crashed down in 2001, leaving a huge pile of pulverized limestone hanging 1,000 feet above the road. It’s that upside-down triangle at the top of the mountain. This spring, millions of gallons of limestone and water slurry moved downhill, and the rest of the pile is expected to come down over the next ten years. There are four loose boulders up there that are as big as houses, and that is a problem. But they have a solution for the pile of pulverized limestone.
The ditch is going to be put in a culvert at this point, and wing dams will be built to funnel the slurry over the ditch and down through this orchard to the river. There’s no way to stop it and no way to move it, so the plan is to let it flow.
The pulverized limestone has dried to the consistency of cement, and both rows of apple trees will be dead before long. This debris flow is considered to be an Act of God, so the ditch company pays for the ditch work, the road department pays for keeping the road clear, and the landowner has to pay for the construction of a slurry channel through his land. I wasn’t clear on who pays for the wing dams, but it might be the Corps.
According to Wikipedia, ”an Act of God or act of nature is a legal term for events outside of human control, such as sudden floods or other natural disasters, for which no one can be held responsible.” (attributed to Black’s Law Dictionary).
This debris flow is classified as an Act of God, but it sure looks like an Act of Gravity to me (no higher power required). If God was involved, perhaps it was that the limestone and water slurry was so liquid. If it had been thicker, said the engineer, it would have swept all the trees along with it, and then you woulda seen a mess.
This is Suzy’s greenhouse three weeks ago.
You can see the big masses that make this a passive solar structure–the solid earth beds, the water tank filled with waterlilies and goldfish, and the adobe wall all absorb heat during the day and release it at night. There are still stray piles of snow outside, but after three weeks the greenhouse is busting out.
It has been chilly at night, so some of the tomatoes are still very petite
but some of the hardier starts are looking positively beefy.
These are all heirloom varieties, plants that were domesticated ages ago and refined by our great great greats. They are gifts of our ancestors.
So many different kinds of food, so many imaginations. Those two flats of leeks at the top of the photo–sheer whimsy! to start like a thread in the air. And each plant has a story. I planted Giant Musselburgh Leeks, an old Scottish variety that was introduced to the US in the early 1800s. Enormous and tender, it stands winter well and is a good buncher (or so they say). And those leeks aren’t two inches high and I’m thinking Rob Roy could’ve eaten those very same leeks in 1700s Scotland.
But alas, Rob Roy is far less dashing than Liam Neeson.
Robert Burns was a Scotsman from the 1700s who might have eaten my leeks,
but he looks like he didn’t eat enough leeks. I had to go back all the way to William Wallace in the early 1300s before I found the face that looked like it could’ve been fed by Scotland’s Giant Musselburgh leeks.
Here is part of the deer herd December 10. The snow came late, so these girls are in prime condition.
Here is nearly the entire herd March 15, at the end of the winter. See how moth-eaten this doe looks?
And doesn’t it seem like these are photos of the same doe, after and before three months of winter rations?
Exactly three months ago Sunday, shortly after ski season started, I got a phone call at noon. “I broke my face,” Sam said. He had landed short when he jumped a road, and his knee hit his lip. He looked like he had a cleft palate.
Bob picked him up at the ski area, and I met them at the hospital. I realized that my child had become an autonomous individual when the doctor came in and my sixteen year old took charge. “I’m Sam,” he said, and shook the doctor’s hand. “Take your time with this, Doc, ’cause I have all day.”
He went home with seventeen stitches in three layers. I hit my face with a ski last spring and had twenty-eight stitches, so we knew the naturopathic drill of vitamins and later massage with castor oil . Three months later you can see that his scar will disappear in time.
My stitches came out exactly one year ago (Sam took my scar picture and I took his) and it’s amazing to me that you can’t tell which cheek the ski went through (left on the photo).
I don’t know if time heals all wounds, but certainly castor oil can take care of the scars.
This is the deer path across our field today, and 21 days ago.
The snow isn’t so deep anymore, but everyone sticks to the paths because it takes less energy.
They’re just as strict about using paths in the forest.
Here’s a place where the deer path going up the hill intersects the deer path going across the hill. See the X?
Here’s a corral at 8500 feet after a long storm dropped six feet of snow.
Here is that same corral exactly three weeks later.
Two or three feet of snow has disappeared into thin air. At high altitude, we have lower atmospheric pressure. When the sun shines, the molecules on the surface of this powdery snow get excited and leap into the air, moving directly from a solid to a gas in a process called sublimation.
It’s like magic: the snow disappears directly into the air without melting. Gone baby gone.
In some ways, time is flexible: my week is like a month to a teen, or a year to a toddler. But photographs tell a different story. Each photo is marked with a date, and these pairs of photos show one week, two weeks, three weeks and four weeks. Today we start with a time span of one week.
One day, this deer had a horrible scrape. Seven days later,
the wound is healing well, and she is very alert. I thought she might be undermined by that scrape, but after a week it’s clear that she’s doing fine.
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