Water, Water (Almost) Everywhere

The last 3 weeks have been a flurry of addition, subtraction, and substitution, mostly in service to winter preparation: firing up a dehumidifier and moving bedrooms, installing a heat pump and mini split for the kitchen/dining area and new wood stove for the living room, taking out kitchen cabinets, ripping out molded drywall and an inefficient water heater from the creepy utility room and installing fresh plywood for a (temporarily) clean and dry space, removing an old, rotting set of French Doors and replacing them with new, insulated and ultra-weatherproof doors, fixing the jankiest downspouts and gutters (the whole gutter system is a mess), and replacing damaged exterior baseboard around the house with plywood, to keep the rodents out of the crawlspace and house.  Cleaning out duct work, aka mouse skyways, from crawlspace and laying down vapor barrier is next on the list.

With a heat pump and a wood stove, the house is almost ready for it's first winter resident in 5 years, yours truly, and I am almost ready for my first (and please God, ONLY) winter without running water or an indoor toilet. After one year and $10,000 in county fees, design fees, and geological and water surveys, my septic designs are finally completed…just in time for the annual moratorium on septic digging for the rainy season. I may look back and laugh at my naivety, but I have adhered myself to a belief that I can get through almost anything once. By spring, water will flow, toilets will flush. I have non-theological faith on my side, as well as a few witches, a good lawyer, and the moral support of many wonderful neighbors

If it hasn't already been made clear, water plays a lead character in the story of this property, flowing freely everywhere but through my faucets. When it rains, a massive moving wall of groundwater starts cascading down from the southwest, saturating the ground, creating temporary wetlands, and cementing heavy trucks in their tracks. It’s clear that this has been an ongoing problem since the property was homesteaded, and even someone who still knows so little about construction and land management (me) can make out a timeline of past attempts at water mitigation, and the traces of a thought process. Sometimes.

All homeowners know the phenomenon of encountering the traces of past-owners’ decisions and asking, “What the hell were they thinking?" It's a rite of passage, passed on from contractor to contractor, deed holder to deed holder, ad infinum. “What the hell were they thinking?” is an empowering deflection against the truth that most of life is out of our control and no one really knows what they're doing.  Yes, shoddy work is shoddy work, but sometimes you’re just trying to solve a problem with the information you have on hand. “What the hell were they thinking?” provokes the same answers as “What is consciousness?” or “What happens to us when we die?” There is no easy answer to a bottomless question, but our species has been trying to find one for hundreds of thousands of years. One way is in asking what the previous tenants were thinking.

Take, for example, this downspout, that was literally depositing water from the roof right into the crawlspace. Was it once connected to a subterranean downspout that drew water further from the house? It's a mystery, now that the downspout is cracked and there's no place for the water to go but back into the house. My solution for the moment is shortening the drain, attaching an elbow, and guiding the water away from the house. Rain barrels will be the next step in the evolution.  Curtain drains at higher elevations on the property will be the one after that, when I can hire an excavator.

Cutting the downspout and moving the water away seems logical to me, but I have instantaneous doubt in any solve originating from my own head, because, DUH, I am a girl. When, I wonder, will I actually identify someone who believes she knows what she's doing? As I fumble my way through internalized misogyny, others' projections of competency and capability, and flashbacks of Diane Lane in "Under The Tuscan Sun." I think I'm slowly becoming more sure-footed with each new turn, pivoting a little quicker with every new development, while accepting my limitations, which are crawlspaces and anything having to do with rodents.