42″ of Rain

Rainfall
The average annual rainfall for our area is about 17” per year. I have a rain gauge in our garden I use to record daily rainfall. A week ago, we surpassed 42”. Playing in this abundance of rain nourished most of what follows.

Runoff taught me to “spread it out, slow it down, soak it in.” Permaculture has the same mantra. The order is important. You start by spreading it out. That slows it down because the runoff has to flow through more frictional resistance. The ground can only absorb the moisture at a certain rate so by slowing it down, the water remains in the area longer, allowing more of it to soak in. So, (1) Spread it out, (2) Slow it down, (3) Soak it in.

Waterbars
The waterbars pictured below exemplify both this idea and the principle “A series of plays reinforces one another and accumulates a power greater than each possesses of themselves.”

Each angled waterbar leads some of the runoff off the trail. This reduces the erosive kinetic energy in two ways. (KE = 1/2 mv2. Kinetic energy equals 1/2 times mass times velocity squared.) Each waterbar reduces the amount of water (its mass) flowing in the channel. This reduction in mass also reduces its velocity.

In the diagram above, the runoff is bordered by a band of lighter blue. This band is the layer of water slowed by its nearness to the trail’s stationary surface. The deeper flow (top diagram) has far more dark blue water that can flow faster. By shunting water off the trail, the thinner flow remaining in the trail must flow slower. This exponentially reduces its kinetic energy. Half the speed, for example, has only a fourth of its kinetic energy. By repeatedly reducing the runoff’s mass and velocity, the series of waterbars prevents the runoff from accumulating erosive energy. This, in turn, protects the waterbars downstream from having to resist more energy that would otherwise accumulate. The series strengthens the series.

I metaphorically apply this to cascades of people, each in our own way, reinforcing one another by making plays that spread the energy out so it soaks in to nourish more possibilities in the world around us all.

A New Kind of Play
I think this will be effective but I really won’t know until next year or so. But it is intriguing enough and seemingly valid enough for me to describe it as a work in progress in case anyone else wants to play with it.

Part 2: I read Brad Lancaster’s book, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond. Constructing swales is one of his important techniques. I wanted to create a swale that would lead some of the runoff flowing in the above picture off the road and across a slope. I built and used an A level to map (with white quartz rocks) three contour lines to help visualize where a swale could lie. Lancaster’s swales involve digging to create the swale and moving that dirt downslope to create the berm that will hold even more water in the swale. I was reluctant to start because (1) the slope felt too steep to hold a swale of the appropriate shape, (2) my slope probably had tree roots all through it, and (3) after all that digging, a gopher tunnel might intersect it some day and drain the whole thing. So I was stuck for a time.

Part 3: At Home Depot, I saw some 4” perforated flexible drainage pipe. It would be much easier for an older man to stretch this pipe out across the slope rather than digging a swale. I wouldn’t have to deal with tree roots. The perforations would allow the runoff to seep out all across the slope. It should be gopher-proof. So I bought some and stretched it out across our slope.
It sort of worked but the pipe clogged up with leaves. (Gaia can form dams in corrugated pipes the same as in road gutters.) I learned that I needed to maintain a constant grade along the entire length of the pipe. If it leveled out, the water slowed down, dropped out sand, and clogged with leaves. My third try had a good grade and has made it so far through our 42” of rain. However, it does not seep evenly across the slope. The water spurts out the perforations in certain places. This water starts converging as it flows down the slope.

All the following pictures are taken looking upslope.

Part 4: A lot of water spurted out for days following some of our atmospheric river rains. So I laid fallen branches or lined rocks across the resulting flows, trying to keep the water spread out and slowed down.

However, it is hard (impossible) to find a branch that will lie flat against uneven ground its entire length.

Part 5: Here is my new play. I lay smaller branches (but longer than the main branch’s gap) across that gap on the upstream side. Repeat if there are still significant gaps. The intent is not to create an impermeable dam of branches. The intent is to quickly create in a few minutes a structure that next autumn’s fallen leaves will float against and form a stronger branch-reinforced Gaia dam. The road runoff will slow down, dropping much of its sandy load behind these taller leaf dams. Instead of a large swale dug across the slope, I hope for small depositional terraces rising all across the slope. I will find out next autumn. (Heavy rains might wash the branches away.)

When I do work like this, I like to think that I’m making the land wiser. What if trees were wise enough to drop their branches along the contours of the slope instead of at random? Well, let’s take the fallen branches and arrange them across the slopes and see what difference it makes.

Snippets
I am trying to find the right balance between the Cairns I used to publish quarterly and this blog. Cairns had a quarterly deadline that made me keep track of and practice describing experiences that led to deeper thoughts. I switched over to a blog to retire from the quarterly deadline. I’ve puttered about, unsure what items were worthy of posting. I didn’t want to send out a regular babble of stuff just to stay present in people’s minds. So I am going to try an experiment I’m calling Snippets. If there is a topic that leads me to post something, I might follow it with a section called Snippets afterwards where some other thoughts or experiences are shared that might not otherwise have been.

In the midst of a wonderful Rain Walk, this sentence came into mind.
“Those of us who can see a better path need to show it to others.”
By this I mean that often something unknown is overlooked and invisible. It often needs to be pointed out to someone who doesn’t see it yet. “Look at the far end of the lake. Now off to the right is a tall snag. Down to the right of that beside the lake is the moose.” “Oh, I see it now!”
So if we can see a path that feels better, we need to point it out and help others see it. It’s not like they are wrong. They just haven’t seen it yet.

Crafty
I was showing something I had made to a friend and she commented that it was “very crafty.” I was taken aback. This thing was not, to use one definition, “adept in the use of subtlety and skillful deceit.” My thing was honest and worthy of pride. It took me a couple of seconds to back up and realize her comment was about craft: “Skill in doing or making something,” Her comment planted “craft” as a seed word in my mind that a few days later sprouted when I looked around our homestead and noticing everything we had crafted. How Alysia designed the chicken palace. How I fixed the latch on the chicken gate. How I’m turning downed slash into biochar and now laying branches as Gaia dam templates across slopes. Crafting materials we have at hand to create solutions tailor-made to a specific situation. Part of the joy of being alive.

Pleasant memory from my teaching days
I love movies and I enjoyed presenting after-school film festivals for my eighth-graders. The perfect movie for 8th graders is The Truman Show. Perfect stretch for their maturing brains. One year, a few days after the movie, a boy came up to me and said, “Now I know that a movie does not have to have violence in it to be a good movie.”

Speaking of good movies, I highly recommend Women Talking. Alysia and I talked about it for more than an hour after the rented DVD was done. A fascinating process as expressing their thoughts and feeling in words helps them strive for the right path through a horrible situation. We held on to the DV so we could watch it again last night. Second viewing helped us understand the familial relationships within the group which added depth. I was fascinated by the facially-communicated mental states of the two teen girls who are mostly on the sideline absorbing how the older women were navigating toward a resolution.