Episode 7

Notes From the North IF Episode 7

Summer is gone - the Autumnal Equinox and Harvest Moon are behind us. Our days have run the gamut from bitterly cold and dismally gray to innocently warm, sunny and clear - as though the weather itself is confused, or the battlefield of contending seasons and influences. We have experienced both the ghosts of summer in 70+ degree weather and the chilly fingers of wind that are harbingers of a bitter winter ahead. Birds still abound, and flies, both seemingly utterly insensible of what lies ahead. Oh, some of the birds must know what awaits us, but many of them I am informed will winter along the Snake River, enduring what we endure with only their frail bones and plumage to stand in for our central heating and double-paned glass windows.

The ever-changing kaleidoscopic clouds give us what we lost when we departed from the coast - the skyscape is our ocean now - mightier by far than any body of water lapping our little planet. The sky is in fact what gave to the ocean it's palette of colors even in San Diego - aquamarine, emerald, orange and pink, dizzying blue and plum, rose and ocher - only now we experience it without reflection or intermediary. I had forgotten how much variety the sky can evince - cotton and slate, granite and fleece, wispy, ponderous, all-encompassing. Our lawn seems as unmoved by the relentless advances of seasonal metamorphosis as ever; I long daily for goats or some ruminant to curb it's indescribable verdancy.

However, I can report, that in two days of heroic labor the uncle of our landlady and even moreso his sturdy helper have at last staunched the hemorrhage of water. By my calculations 224,640 gallons of purified water have been returned to the earth since we arrived - God alone knows how much before we got here.

When they arrived Monday to survey the job, it seemed that they were going to have to rip up our extensive driveway, drill through the wall and perform other messy and extensive modifications. They chucked all that in favor of a new plan.

It turns out that this house once occupied a different location, and some local disaster necessitated it's removal to the site it now occupies. This meant that the utility connections were kludges - making no sense at all except for that circumstance. The newest arrangement has adhered to that tradition. Instead of breaking up the concrete, they brought in a baby backhoe (which was so cute and so useful I instantly conceived a desire to possess it or one like it) and trenched along the side of the house, along the back and under our deck. There was just barely room to operate under our deck to the requisite depth to allow them to drill a new orifice admitting the new water main. This was then mated untidily but snugly to the existing water infrastructure. the final connection was consecrated today and water service is restored.

May I for a moment relate what it is like to be unable to flush the toilet, or wash your hands or anything else? Water is like breath - only appreciated in it's absence. As I used to tell myself - never to for a day let the beauty of San Diego go unacknowledged, so will I now daily offer a hosannah to the availability of clean water - a commodity unavailable to too many of our fellow humans.

We did learn that the contents of a trench, once abstracted from it are greater than the trenches' capacity when one attempts to restore them. In other words - we have heaps of dirt where once only immortal and vigorous lawn once reigned. Dustin is going to plant tulip bulbs tomorrow when our utility myrmidons have restored it to the best of their ability. I only wish they had treated the rest of our never-to-be-sufficiently damned lawn the same - then I could have a sensible, extensive garden instead of a useless, voluptuous emerald carpet. I watch our neighbors stolidly mowing their own lawns every 3 or 4 days, stoically riding or walking behind their fume-spewing mowers. I think a lawn is a fine hobby for a widower or someone released from hard labor, or suffering from delusions which would be ameliorated by sisyphean toil, or someone seeking a zen release from the real world of profitable activity - but it is surely no good for me, or the environment, or those millions of others who could be shredding paper or doing anything at all which has a beginning, an end and accomplishes something substantive in between.

I had occasion to walk about a mile along the country road which is 2 blocks from our house, and I am ashamed to say that I have not seen litter of that sort of variety and abundance since the crying Indian commercial in 1970. This reaffirms my belief that we have time-warped back to 1965 when we moved here. On the brighter side I did retrieve a rather large plant pot which we will store for use next spring. I walked further than I intended - telling myself that this must be only at the intersection, it must be limited to the last segment of the highway in town, but it continued with no slackening out of sight beyond the point at which I turned back. OK - there were no shopping carts, decapitated bodies or corpses of large animals such as anyone might stumble across in Balboa Park, but it took my breath away to see so much trash discarded so haphazardly along the canal and fields with their dumbly nodding fields of corn.

Perhaps the volcanic origins of this landscape have contributed to a longer-range view of litter than is the norm - in a hundred thousand years, maybe as few as thirty thousand, the Yellowstone super-volcano will explode, rendering all the litter (and much of North American civilization) moot by covering it with basaltic magma and reducing all organic components to incandescent ash. BUT - in the meantime - is it only I who sees the trash? Am I the only one it bothers? Can the entire ecology movement, the whole of the revolution in human thinking have actually passed by Idaho Falls? AND - may I add, superfluously for those who have been reading carefully, this sort of litter would NEVER be permitted on any of these pristine, fast-growing, high-maintenance and low utility lawns!

Tonight I am making spaghetti squash casserole for dinner to celebrate the end of our water flowing, endlessly flowing.

Tune in for the next episode of Notes From the North!