Tread softly

My phone carrier Vodafone sent a message 22/Dec announcing free national and international calls and txts on Christmas Day. Way-hay you might think! But Bobby-no-pals has a very limited Venn diagram intersecting a) people in my phone book with b) people who'd entertain a call from someone who only calls at Christmas. The other aspect is that our phone coverage is so crappy that I often have to charge outdoors holding my  Nokia aloft to launch a txt.

On Christmas Day in the arvo I left my female rellies slaving in the kitchen, seized my  Nokia  and my azada.  The phone for free-calling, the azada in tribute to Paddy Looney who was happy to do drain work for his community of hill-walkers. I made contact with my Britse rellies alright, but the Merkins weren't picking up at 09:00hrs local time. It was wonderful to be up the hill on me tod. But the journey was infinitely enhanced by bringing Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain as an audiobook. In the shade of the forest 130m higher than our yard ice lingered on the path as micro-plates suspended between the stones. With happy synchronicity, Nan was simultaneously describing a burbling winter burn that could be heard but not seen through flat translucent sheets linking the boulders of the creek. The ice had formed on the surface of pools which had subsequently drained away downhill.

Shepherd wrote her book in WWII, describing her ventures to, across and round the Cairngorm massif which defines the central part of the Scottish Highlands. She was then in her 50s and teaching English in Aberdeen; but using every spare minute to progress her compelling love-affair with the hills. The Living Mountain is the result of decades of focussed attention on the details of what the landscape presented. She cherished the reds of birch leaves in September and ling blossom & flitting mountain ringlet in July. Nan Shepherd is on the money:

She could pause still enough, for long enough, to bring a crested tit Lophophanes cristatus close enough to breathe on and had often looked down upon golden eagles Aquila chrysaetos as they coursed the heather valleys for dinner.

And all her observations of people, birds and mammals; butterflies and beetles; shrubs and bright flowers; were recorded with judicious evocative descriptions that run arpeggios on the hum of the holistic landscape. A small taste. Our own red hill Cnoc Rua is only quantitatively different from Nan's Cairngorms: slighter but no less interesting to those who pause in their rush and chatter to really see what unfolds before their open eyes.

I have spread my cloths under your feet

Tread softly for you tread on my dreams

Eponymous adzeAx

 You need the right tool for the job. If you're just futzing around in a corner of the haggard clearing nettles and "dirt", then anything with a steel edge will do: a scythe, a bill-hook, a shovel. But to work for hours, it's definitely worth investing in something fit for purpose and preferably fit for your build. Thus my well-used and much beloved scythe is adjustable for the spacing of the handles and the pitch of the blade. Someone with longer legs or shorter arms should really adjust the settings or use their own cutter. Like wise if you're five-feet-nothing you're better off sawing the last foot off the handle of your shovel. Apart from my scythe, the handiest implement in my tool-shed is my azada - a Spanish chopping spade. It's downward action is the best for tilling a potato patch or clearing a drain. You basically cannot buy one in Ireland, which is a loss.

Let's hear it for Ed Pulaski, the leader of a fire-crew in the Idaho Hills during the Big Blowup of 1910 when 1 million hectares of forest from Montana up into British Columbia went up in smoke. Fire is no respecter of an international border. A change of wind caused the blaze to surround Pulaski's crew of 45 foresters. But, knowing the local terrain from long experience, he led the crew to an abandonned mine adit and forced them to stay there lying on the ground until danger was past. 40 of the men survived many of them injured from burns and smoke inhalation [Microdocumentary by Steffen Riley]. 

We only know this story because in the following years Pulaski developed and pushed a particular design of chopper which came to be named eponymously: it's not an ax-adz or an adze/axe or even a Pulaski Ax it's a Pulaski. During the 1930s, this design spread out from the Northern Rockies all over North America with the appro of the US Forest Service. The front end is a (razor-sharp) axe for felling brush and brashing larger trunks. The other side of the shaft sports a heavier-duty curved blade for chopping roots and dirt, and generally depriving the fire of fuel. Seems to do the job. But really the basic design goes back 2,000 years to the Roman legionary's dolabra.

Talking of antient historie, I'll give a shout to Pat the Salt's favorite tool-about-the-site: the griffán or graff which is superficially identical to a Pulaski. It's a pick-axe with two blades: one at right-angles to the other: a wider grubbing blade backed by a shorter sharper blade that destroys tree roots. Much heavier than my azada so not imo useful unless you have biblically stony ground to break up . . . as last Saturday when we were planting trees.

Customer satisfaction

'Tis the End of Days, lads. After a Summer of no rain at all, we got a Summer's worth of wet in 48 hours.  A couple of weeks after that, we had a deluge in daylight. Naturally, I stripped down to shorts and a tee-shirt to save the surface of the lane from being swept to buggery. There's no point in putting on Cape Horn foul-weather gear [even if I had it] because everything would be soaked anyway and it's easier to dry a single tee than a shirt and sweater and "rain" coat. Got a few tsk tsks from my roomies about silly old men courting a trip to the hospital; but the risk to me was minimal and the risk to my wallet considerable if I sat out the storm on my sofa.

But when the second waterbutt-filler happened at the beginning of September, I could not find my Javi = azada = fartanya = mattock [as R]. I have two, of different sizes with replacement handles and I had to use a long-handled shovel which is not the tool of choice for scraping crap out of a drain. Shag this, I said the following day, I R retire, I have four pensions dribbling in from two countries, I should really be giving back to the economy. Forthwith I ventured onto the broad reaches of the interwebs, to see who would sell me a new azada. Lenehans of Capel Street had a heavy-duty digging hoe in stock for €30 . . . free delivery for orders over €50. Having, like Mr Worthing, just lost both parents digging tools, I ordered two of them at €60 to qualify for free deliv.

Lenehans used to be an old fashioned city centre hardware store but they have embraced the internet: claiming to be what3words, as well as eircode, enabled andn taking my e-money with the least possible fuss. My brace of azadas came bundles up in cardboard and sticky tape less than 48 hours after I placed my order. Several e-mails came in parallel, tracking the delivery from warehouse to clearing to depot to van. And when the order was fulfilled, another e-mail directed me to Trustpilot to share the experience:

Lenehans had what I needed 14/Sep/2022
Lenehans had what I needed, at a competitive price, and shipped it quickly and reliably.
Q. What more could you want?
A. A ham and cheese toastie!
Date of experience: 08 September 2022

Reply from Lenehans.ie 20/Sep/2022

Thank you for your review. We appreciate you taking the time to respond and look forward to providing excellent service to you again in the future.
We can't help with the ham and cheese but we do stock sandwich toasters ;)
https://www.lenehans.ie/searchanise/result?q=sandwich%20toaster
Kind regards,
Lenehans.ie

Brimful

Three weeks ago, I was obsessing about the rain [lack of] and how disconcertingly crisp was the yard after a no-rain July. The rain gods delivered a steady drizzle on the 3rd August and then buggered off back to the tropics. On 27th August we were part of a yellow rainfall-with-thunder warning. I took The Beloved to the Dublin train, acquired some groceries, and got back home by 10:00am. Just as the heavens opened. It's not Winter, so I instanter stripped down to shorts [no, not me undies USAians] and a T-shirt, seized my biggest azada, and spent 30 minutes beefing up the berms which divert water from the surface of the lane into the parallel drain. It rained steady for the next 4 hours, at the end of which 37mm of rain had fallen. That's an inch and half or about 5% of the annual average rainfall in East Ireland.  Over the 10:00 to 10:00 24 hours about 44mm fell. And we are forecast for more rain in reasonable amounts over the next week, 

By skipping about between my various pumps, siphons and containers, we are now back to full capacity:

• 2200 lt - 2x 1tonne IBC 
• 200 lt - 1 large herring barrel
• 330 lt - 3x med herring barrels
• 240 lt - 1 blue stable-barrow [R bot]
• 100 lt - 1 orange movers packing crate [R top]
• 100 lt - misc 20lt buckets
• 3 tonnes total 

In June I was delighted to score some as-new bright orange food grade buckets with snap lids [R top]. Hill-walking friends-and-neighbours came by to harvest some hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor seed to put brakes on the grass in their lawn. We had a great time, thrashing the standing plants into buckets until we had a few hundred grams of mostly hay-rattle seed. Bonus: misc other wildflowers. I expressed admiration for the buckets they had brought for this purpose and two days later six as-new buckets appeared over the gate into our yard. Mick was quietly pleased to be presenting orange buckets to the local Prod. But I am colour-blind in these matters: and not all protestants sport a sash.

Make like a cone

More tributes to the Irish way of death last week. About four years ago a friend of ours, a bit older than me, started the process of forgetting and had been declining ever since. The trajectory was similar to that of my late lamented FiL Pat the Salt: every time they rallied it was never quite back to status quo ante the last slump. The trend was ever downwards but ziggy zaggy and unpredictable. Friend's family wanted to keep her at home, and this turned out to be possible to the very end but required A Lot of support from carers, friends and relations. In the last month, and then the last week, things took a tumble. Palliative care was triggered by the GP, and the family abroad was advised to return sooner rather than too late.

The Beloved called over on Sunday (taking my most recent batch of marzipan scones) and contributed one bedside vigil while the nuclear family caught up on sleep, messages and essential outdoor work [hens division]. TB returned with a report that their access lane was cratered: Maybe I could come along the next day to estimate how many tonnes of 804 road-stone would see it fit for end-of-life increased traffic. Obvs, we're more alert than normal to road-fails and potholes. But I did caution that, however well intentioned, visiting your own priorities and solutions on other people was not guaranteed to cause joy. The parable of My Father and the Tea-towels might be relevant.

When we arrived the next day Monday, I snapped some pics: 

. . . and, hearing a chain-saw rattling away behind the house, went to talk manly things with that part of the ménage. I airily explained that I was there pretending to be a civil engineer wrt the potholes. I am not totally incapable of reading the room and my gambit was greeted with a touch of bristle. Because, of course, their pot-holes were a known thing, indeed a tonne of 804 had been been delivered. The potholes had been filled before the Christmas, and again before Storm Chandra in Jan, but Project Pothole was at nothing until the weather dried out. Fair enough, but I did lend him my second-best mattock / azada as the optimum tool for road-works. 

Meanwhile, inside the house, end-of-life issues were riding post. The Beloved sat in for another bedside vigil while two family members went to the undertakers. I'm not sure if Team Palliative got to make even their first scoping visit because, a couple of hours after we left, The Principal left the stage. At almost exactly the same time her daughter touched down at Dublin Airport having dropped everything to fly in from England. At 10:30 that night there was a ratAtat at the door to reveal three neighbouring women. They wanted to assure the family that sandwiches (so many sandwiches) would appear the following day, the catering tea-pot would be borrowed from the village hall, extra chairs would manifest themselves . . . indeed all the necessaries which the bereaved might not have head-space or experience to take on board.

When we returned again for the wake on StPs Tuesday, the lane-lake had been drained of water and filled with gravel and the pot-holes filled! The English daughter expressed wonder and gratitude at seeing how many people had rallied to the family, bringing ham [and other] sandwiches from all over the province and/or being up to their elbows sudsing tea-cups and plates for the next round of visitors. I hastened to explain that, although it wasn't transactional, her mother had already paid it forward by her care and attention for the marginalized and the dispossessed.

Wednesday it was into town again for the humanist service of gratitude and remembrance at the pub-undertakers followed by more tea & sandwiches [other beverages available - it's a pub]. I was tasked to stand 🗼in the street to hold, for the immediate family, the two parking spots adjacent to the undertakers. They also serve who only stand and wait.

Waterblind

D'ye live in these [Western European Archipelago WEA] islands? How was Storm Deirdre for you? It was wet wet wet for us. It rained from wee-hours Saturday 15/12/18 for 24 hours. I got up at first light and, with my azada and a shovel in gloved hands, I went to clear the drain that runs up beside the lane to our house. It's important to do this in the rain because then you can see where the debris is getting accumulated and scoop it clear. I was thereafter confident that the water would run away below us. In the early afternoon it eased off a little and I peeked out of the gate to see water roaring down the drain from above. I wasn't surprised: Storm Deirdre delivered about 50mm of rain in 24 hours. Usually 24 days would have to pass to accumulate that much precipitation. 15km East of here, the River Slaney burst its banks at Enniscorthy [again] and flooded the shops along the quay.

It was no time to creep back under the duvet and hope that things would be okay. Therefore, I shucked myself into my rain gear and plodded up the hill with my tools. Sometimes a mighty back-hoe is the tool of choice - ripping and tearing and dumping stuff in and out of the way: but they make a terrible ragged mess which will be particularly vulnerable to subsequent water damage. Sometimes a more focused Little-Hans-at-the-Dyke attack is better. In 1997, after we suffered the first destruction of our access road from a surfeit of rushing water, I button-holed one of our neighbours as he drove up the lane to talk about a solution. I pointed to a heap of 2-inch-down or Clause 804 gravel in our yard and said he could have as much as he wanted to make berms across the lane above our house. We agreed 4 places where a small intervention would turn any water off the road surface and into a big drain that would take it elsewhere. The next few times he went up the mountain to view his sheep, he brought up a front-loader full of aggregate and dumped it at the appointed places; and smoothed it out with a shovel while I was driving a desk up in Dublin. Over the years, these humps have settled down and grassed over and are, for intermittent flash floods, as good as concrete.

My Deirdre task was to make sure that the exits at each of these escape chutes were not clogging up.

Berm001. The lowest berm was holding firm but the ruts of the roadway above were inches deep in running water. As the slope is about 1:10 there is a lot of kinetic energy in the moving water and pebbles were bouncing along in the torrent - the twigs and fallen leaves or spikes of gorse Ulex had already been swept clean and down. My problem here is that, three years ago, we installed a long 30cm ⌀ plastic drain-pipe to carry the spill-water downhill. The plastic pipe is super slick inside but it's a long flattish journey for all the debris and I am concerned that it is slowly filling up. When it rains enough to flush things through, more crud is coming down from above. I only put in the pipe to stop my neighbour-above from swinging his tractor and trailer into the open drain every frigging time he turned into his field. The collapsed drain was invisible to him but I'd go up periodically to shovel the debris clear against the next flood.

Berm002. I went up to barrier two knowing in was a lost cause. A while back, the same neighbour had decided that there was no advantage to him in allowing water to spill into his field 3 or 4 times a year . . . as insurance that there would be a lane to drive up to that field in the future. This is ironic because the 1997 flood stripped the topsoil and a generous dressing of artificial fertiliser from his newly created pasture and dumped it all in a heap on the county road. That Spring he'd been clearing and smoothing that 4 hectare field having knocked and buried and levelled all the walls and drains and ditches that had separated the 5 smaller fields which he'd bought at auction. After the storm and the loss and destruction he confessed ruefully: "The village idiot stood on the ditch and called out 'Sean, Sean, where's the water going to go, Sean?'" He had to get the back-hoe back on site to restore the drains that kept the mountain catchment delivering itself into the top of his 4 ha field and leaving 5 minutes later from the bottom corner.

Berm003. Like Berm001 this was holding its own and performing at specification. But like Berm001, there was a lot of water being turned aside here. With some trepidation, therefore, I quickened my pace to find out why so much water was travelling.

Berm004. Aha! When I arrived, water was brimming behind this dam and spilling over into the road-bed to gather speed on its way down hill. I started shovelling sods and mud up on top of the berm but these were getting carried away as soon as they were thrown up. I was alone, increasingly wet & out of my depth in water and resources. So I stopped and looked at the situation sideways; in particular at the place where the lake behind the berm headed East and into a capacious drainage channel. Water wasn't making its exit. I plunged into the lake and started to pull crud from the holes in the wall through which the water was meant to drain. Out came twigs, leaves, brambles, gorse, matted grass, old bracken: with each clot, mud and small stones came out with cloooargh sound. It was like a bath draining: the outflow increased dramatically and the level of the lake fell 20cm in about five minutes making the remains of my pathetic earlier shovellings look like sprinkles on a cake.

This is The Mountain Gate aka The Iron Gate; just to show what blurfed out of the drain this last weekend. The largest stones are as big as a baby's head. Also note the ominous sign on the gate. Forestry Operations are 15 hectares of scrubby hillside which is even as I write being grubbed up and stripped of bushes and ditches to plant Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis. The rain isn't going to stop because they planted some trees and a lot of exposed top-soil is going to start travelling until the tree-roots spread out and start holding things together. Tricking about with running water can be fun but only if you box clever. Being water blind [Fr. aveugleau ?] or staying on the sofa watching telly when it is hosing down outside is just laying yourself open to more expense and trouble later on.

Always for others

We live, as its says on the sidebar, halfway up a mountain in the Sunny South East.  Our lane is an important access point for the Blackstairs massif, rising from the county road at a 10% incline and pointing more or less straight at the telecoms masts on the top of Mt Leinster.  10% of a slope is good, it gets you the height without having to scramble using your hands and you can talk as you walk.  We know this is possible because every weekend if we're in the yard we hear snippets and fragments of conversation as hill-walkers go past.  Some fifteen years ago, when the girls were small they spent much of their lives out in the yard and in the trees on either side of the lane.  It was through them that we met Paddy Looney who was coming down from the hills in which he loved to ramble.  As a trained soldier he always took emergency rations when he was out on the hill - you never know when you're going to fall and you know that if such a thing happens you're not going to be found immediately.  But coming down from the hill and a few hundred meters from the car, his emergency rations were surplus to requirements.  So he asked if he could give his brace of chocolate bars to our gannets.  Whatever nonsense about not taking sweets from strange men, Paddy was instantly no longer a stranger.  Over the years my girls grew fat on his leavings!  When they weren't there, he'd ask after them and on the few occasions when his passing coincided with my presence outside he'd stop and chat.  I always felt happier for having met him again.

Now a straight-enough slope of 10% is great for walkers but it gives water a tremendous acceleration if enough of it gets into the road-bed.  Twice in 12 years the whole surface of the lane was torn up and delivered to the county road in a heap: data and calculations here.  I've re-engineered our lane over the years by scratching up little transverse berms so that any falling rain gets diverted off the lane before it starts to travel.  And many years ago I persuaded one of our farming neighbours to deliver a couple of tractor-buckets of roadstone up the mountain in a couple of key places to divert the mountain-water (of which there can be a helluva lot) off the roadway and into drains. A little of this maintenance keeps the lane car-accessible to us and the postman. It also makes a difference to the surface under foot and means that hill-walkers can do the first part of their trek without twisting an ankle.  Every year I take an azada (see right) and repair and rebuild these berms and shovel out the accumulated debris.  It has made sense to go further and further up the lane to turn off running-water problems before they start.

A couple of years ago, I met Paddy as he came down off the mountain. Instead of carrying a Mars-bar or a compass, he was toting a shovel.  He had spent the previous few weekends on his own up the mountain tricking about with the drains so that the water didn't destroy the lane. You can still benefit from the results of his care today.  I can see why I might do that, partly for my own good and partly from a sense of proprietorship.  But it's not so clear why Paddy who lived 40km away should make a special trip to make life easier and more enjoyable for other people.  Except if you knew Paddy!: because his open heart and generous hand were clear to all when you were in his presence.  I say "if you knew Paddy" because he died last Sunday - by all accounts of a heart-attack while clearing drains after the Darwinday storms.  I hardly knew the man but I still feel that a light has gone out in our lives.

Acequia

I mentioned aqueducts, somewhat elliptically, back in March.  Now I'm back there because my California water-guru Juan Browne is bored with going to visit the Oroville dam and spillway repairs and has gone down-stream to Yuba City, CA, large sections of which are built below high-water on the Feather River and protected by levees. Your attention-span for hydro-engineering is likely much shorter than mine, so I'll give you an executive summary for how to make a levee water-proof. Concrete is riotously expensive not only in money but also in carbon foot-print because it employs a lot of cement:

• Calcination by heat from calcium carbonate to lime
• CaCO₃ → CaO + CO₂
• phoohee! watch all that carbon dioxide go atmospheric
• it accounts for 5% of the anthropogenic carbon footprint annually
• add water to make slaked lime (calcium hydroxide):
• CaO + H₂O → Ca(OH)₂
• setting as excess water evaporates
• carbonation as atmospheric CO₂ is absorbed back to calcium carbonate
• Ca(OH)₂ + CO₂ → CaCO₃ + H₂O

Concrete is rather effectively water-proof, but mainly because modern concrete uses Portland Cement which incorporates hard impermeable silcates in the mix with the slaked lime. That's why you see it used in bridges, drains, walls, pillars and dams. But it's also rock hard and quite brittle.  The stones of which our farm-buildings are built are stuck together with lime mortar because it is a bit hygroscopic (water-absorbing) and considerably more plastic than the sand-and-[portland]cement used to bond concrete blocks or red bricks in building work. Our rough stone walls need to have more give because the stones are many-and-varied and each will have a different coefficient of thermal expansion. As the wall heats up in the sun, the grey granite expands a little more than the red granite but the lime-mortar takes up the slack nicely so the stones don't crack.

Acequia is the name used for irrigation ditches in Andalucia. It looks like it might have something to do with aqua /water but actually the word is transliterated from the Arabic as-sāqiya = the water-bearer. When Los Reyes Catolicos finally completed the reconquista with the fall of Granada in 1492. they kept the Andalucian peasants because only they knew how the acequia system worked and, especially, how to maintain it. The acequia were contoured: snaking round the face of precipitous hills to get from source to orange grove with just the right amount of fall / flow. They knew how destructive moving water can be. Flash flood? [10cm of rain falls in some distant place and a life time's supply of firewood goes past at 30km/h].  In 1500 Spain all maintenance was main{hand}tenance. The peasants would go up every year with azadas and delicately lift out seedlings from the water course while leaving alone the vegetation beside the watercourse because their roots held the clay in place for the channel walls. Repairing with stone or concrete was a disaster because the discontinuity between dirt and concrete is an incipient failure. And concrete settles and then cracks and water causes more settlement and cracking and . . . catastrophe.

In Yuba City this summer they are repairing a 5km stretch of the levee. The money has been freed up because of the Oroville spillway fiasco has put water-damage higher up the political pecking order. One of the issues with managing the discharge from Lake Oroville was/is to keep it steady, lads. If you let out the bath upstream then the water rises up against the face of the levee saturating it. If you then turn off the tap then the water drains away to the Pacific and the water-logged levee slumps down ripping out trees and bushes whose roots hold the structure together. This is one of four ways in which levees fail [helpful if school-marmish explanation with cartoons and cross-section] and their different solutions

• slumping or undercutting of the face
• reinforce the face with rock or concrete too big to wash away
• seepage through the structure
• cut a vertical trench in the levee up to 30m deep and parallel to the river. Back-fill it, not with concrete, with a mix of bentonite clay and local dirt that will settle down and bend a little during earthquakes and settle some more. Clays tend to be water-impermeable. Concrete will, sooner or later, crack; probably inaccessibly 20m below the surface.
• seepage under the structure
• build a seepage berm out from the foot of the levee to slow the water down by forcing it to travel through more dirt. When it surfaces, it travels, when it travels it carries all before it.
• overtopping
• Sandbags!
• Or maybe here a neat concrete wall to raise the flood level from 100 year height to 200 year height [as you fondly believe from looking backwards at the data rather than forwards through climate change extrapolation.

That was an education for me  to realise that Hans Brinker is not the only way to prevent dykes getting destroyed in a storm.