That fourth thing was El Niño. Thirty-nine inches of rain fell that winter. (Normal is around thirteen inches.) If I went walking up in the fields in the rain, I could find places where I could continue the lesson from Kiet Siel: Split the flow; don’t oppose it. On rainy school days, Alysia covered my class for me so that I could roam up there, making plays and learning from the flowing water.
I started by making check dams like I had out at Kiet Siel. Instead of 2×4’s, I excavated blocks of sod (leaving pockmarks throughout the fields) and placed them where the runoff would back up and flow off to either side.
One of the first things I learned from the heavier rain storms is that the structures that survived were those located high in the drainage. This makes sense. Up near the ridge lines, whatever runoff there is is shallow and slow, so my check dams oppose only modest forces. As the runoff converges downslope, however, both its depth and velocity increase. Kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity so the deeper, faster water downslope has far more energy to wash out a check dam. This led me to my first “strategy”. Go high in the drainage. Up there I will be able to find a place that is within my power to shift a relative balance.
Up there, watching how runoff interacted with my dams led to a simpler, more powerful design. The runoff revealed that I didn’t need to stop its forward momentum with a check dam. All I really needed to do was turn it onto a new path. My structures shifted from a straight across the entire channel check dam to an angled “wing dam” on the side.
As I made more of these, the runoff taught me how to make them more efficiently. At first, it was sometimes hard to build the “wing dam” in the midst of the runoff. After all, it was just a piece of sod sitting in a flow of runoff that could push it downstream. But eventually I learned to make the new path first. With my shovel, I’d first slice into the bordering sod an angled channel along which I wanted the water to flow. Creating this new path invited some of the runoff to start flowing along it. With less runoff now flowing along the original channel, less kinetic energy was now present.
I would then take the brick of sod on my shovel and place it just upstream and opposite from the new channel to form the wing dam. This shunted even more of the runoff onto the new path. Not all of it, but enough to split the water so that the two paths together slowed the runoff and reduced the kinetic energy flowing down the slope. Because my new channel was already leading some of the water its way, the placement of the sod to make the wing dam encountered less force from the runoff flowing against it than it otherwise would. The wing dam augments the effectiveness of the new channel and the new channel strengthens the effect of the wing dam. The work grew wiser and far easier, leading me eventually to where now I carry only a trowel. This more stable sequence led me to the strategy of Offer a new path before opposing the old path. This felt profound in an aikido sort of way.
As the winter rains stretched on, I’d go up into the fields and find runoff oozing in places where I had never seen it before, which created opportunities for more plays. Working my way up making these plays led to the source of this runoff: one of my wing dams in another channel. The diverted flow had crept along a new path which now, visible, created opportunities for yet more plays lower within the drainage. I was able to expand the area I could work effectively in. The work was growing on itself.
As El Niño stretched into spring, life responded to the presence of more water. Grass grew more abundantly in the areas where I had sent runoff. The thicker carpet of grass acted like a sponge, slowing the flow of runoff so that more of it soaked in instead of flowing down towards the sea. A reinforcing feedback spiral emerged of more water soaking in, nourishing more plants, creating a more absorbent soil that allowed more of the rain to soak in.
Plants create a complex surface of roots, stems and leaves that thicken the soil. These surfaces wedge scouring winds away from the soil so that it doesn’t blow away. These surfaces shade the soil from baking sun. These surfaces absorb the considerable impact of the falling raindrops so that the drops end up sliding down a stem and gently contacting the uncompacted, absorbent ground. These surfaces contain edible energy that fuel the burrowing of worms and gophers that aerate the soil and help roots breathe. The rain penetrates deeper so that even more of it is absorbed. Leaf surfaces rot into humus that enriches the soil, making it ever more absorbent. The work grows on itself. I do not work alone. I am surrounded by allies.
These lessons felt important and worth sharing, so I wrote an article, “Becoming Part of Gaia”, and sent it to my favorite magazine, CoEvolution Quarterly. My life path might have been different if they had rejected it but they published it in the Fall of 1984 (No. 43, p. 4-10). Several readers wrote letters, sharing ways in which my article combined with their experiences to foster new insights for us all. This path felt affirmed.
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