“I want to go with Dad,” Ellen declared as I got out of the
car.
She reached
for my hand and we walked the rocky (literally and figuratively) road to its
end just before our lot. That is where
it met a snow filled gully at a willow line.
Someone had cut a trail through the willows a year or so before. I crouched down and felt her arms reach up around
my neck before I stood back up with my little burden, trudging through the snow
breaking trail for her Mom and Dave.
We were
there figuring out where to dig our test holes to determine location of our
house, garage, and drain field. It was
an extraneous act. The lot directly
south held a ton of gravel, the one just down the hill to the west of us looked
like a gravel parking lot, and the other developed property just to the
north-west had beautiful rock for building.
“Yeah, I am
pretty confident,” Dave said as we walked up the hill, “but one thing I have
learned is that I don’t always know.”
At $100 a
piece, the holes would be cheap insurance, but once they were dug, we were
planning on immediately pulling the trigger on ordering supplies to get a
garage up as a base to build our house out of.
“I can get
the excavator up here this week,” Dave stated, “We’ll come up with a time, and
you can come out and see the holes being dug.
I like the owner to be there.”
As we
walked back toward the car, Ellen was visibly confused and frustrated.
“Where are
we going?” she asked. “Aren’t you going
to build my house?”
“Well, Bub,”
her mom explained, “we need to get materials shipped in, a foundation put down…”
“There’s
wood right there,” Ellen gestured to the pallets we had brought up the hill to
build garden beds out of.
“We’re going
to need a little bit more than that, Bub,” I tried to clarify, “but today was a
step closer.”
“Well, don’t
forget that I want a telescope in my room,” and she turned and reached up to me
to be carried back to the car.
Dave’s son
Reuben, Bub (of course) and I went up to the lot a couple of days later once
they had the excavator in place. Bub had
seen equipment being worked on television, but it was something that had her in
awe as the heavy tracked vehicle crawled its way through the snow we had just
struggled through and then worked its way up the hill. She would stand as close as I would let her
and then retreat when I would yell for her to move back as the machine continued
its approach.
 |
| Bub's first real-life experience with an excavator was awe inspiring... but even this impressive machine struggled with the concrete hard permafrost found just below the topsoil. |
The bucket
punched through the top layer and began struggling with what it found underneath. I smiled as I saw large chunks dropping out
of the bucket.
“Wow, he
hit rock fast,” I said to Ellen who was wrapped around my left leg watching
with mouth open.
The going
was slow and it got to the point that Reuben was only able to remove about a
five-gallon scoop at a time and the front of the tracks were being lifted up
off the ground with each effort. I began
realizing that it wasn’t rock. He was
only four feet into the ground when Dave walked up behind me.
“Wow,” Dave
commented, “didn’t expect to find that.”
Permafrost. The rock that Reuben had been extracting was
actually large chunks of frozen clay.
It was
pretty much the same thing we had built our Galena house on, but it was kind of
a game changer in Unalakleet. For one,
we were planning on harvesting rock from our lot to finish building the road to
our property as well as building the driveway to the garage.
There was
no rock. Seven feet down, and it was
still frozen clay.
“Let’s try
over by those willows,” Dave pointed toward the south boundary line. “Maybe we can find something there for your
drain field.
The ground
was not frozen there and the bucket penetrated easily: a better sign. It was still mostly clay, but the bucket
started turning up signs of gravel… and then signs of water.
“Well, it
looks like we could get deep enough to do a septic before hitting the water,”
Dave said. “So, that is a better. Can’t build on it, but this would work for
your drain field. Let’s look further up
the hill to see if we can find a good building site with better soils.”
The third
hole started out okay. Reuben punched
through the thin layer of top soil and began pulling up full buckets of
material, which quickly turned into partial buckets filled with more frozen
clay.
“Huh,” I gave
my very educated opinion.
“Yeah,” Dave
agreed, “not what I figured we’d find.”
“That
pretty much determines that we shouldn’t build here,” I yelled to Dave over the
roar of the excavator.
“Well, I
wasn’t going to make that decision for you, but that is what I was thinking. No need throwing good money after bad,” Dave
agreed.
Reuben shut
off the machine and we began walking down the hill.
“Hey,” Ellen
yelled confused again, “I thought we were going to build my rainbow house.”
Evidently
after meeting no resistance to her telescope proposal she figured she’d go for
broke.
“Well, Bub,
not quite yet,” I said a little disheartened.
“Looks like I won’t be getting my shop just yet though either… but,” I
continued, “I’m working on it.”
Myra was waiting
expectantly at home when Ellen and I walked through the door.
“Celebration?”
She asked.
“Not exactly,”
I answered, “permafrost.”
“Wow,
really?”
“Back to square
one,” I said trying to sound okay with it, and honestly the more we talked
about it, the more we were.
This was
not the first building project that we ran into hurdles on or heard the answer
of “not yet” on. The first house we
built had multiple not yets that all turned into God taking care of us (don’t
know how else to explain it) better than we could have taken care of ourselves.
We said
grace just in time to beat Bub’s first shovel full of noodles into her mouth.
“We didn’t
build my rainbow house yet,” she said not looking up from the noodles she was
urgently working on.
“Not yet,”
Mom replied, “but we’re working on it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment