Sewers Are A Good Thing

DayBooks: 28-Aug-96 (Wed) 06:10 - Freeman Lake

I finally got the 32-bit TWAIN drivers for the scanner working with Win95, and Paint Shop Pro can "see" it again. They've been digging up the road in front of my cottage for the last week, and there's no end in sight. These triplets of Polaroids document the disruption of my tranquility.

On the left is the cottage with the Adm. Gracie parked in the driveway … this is how it looked when I moved in four years ago. In the middle is the aftermath of the Great Tree Massacre … they cut down the maple tree in front of the hedges and the fifty year old oaks on either side of the previous picture. On the right you can see the Mother of All Steam Shovels (a Komatsu) and how close it got to my precious hedges!

I used to have a beach, but I woke up one day to find that it had been barricaded to prevent pollution of the lake when the construction people came through … they did it before I got around to putting the dock in the water for the summer. <sigh!> In the middle you can see the growth along the shoreline, and the Komatsu on the main road in the distance … a week later, it was in front of my cottage, which is to the right (unseen in this triplet). They put the dock in the water for me, then tore down the fence so they had room to maneuver.

Here they are lifting my dock over the barrier and into the water. I woke up the next day to find the Komatsu's treads outside my patio door. The following day, there was an eight foot hole where the road used to be! With all of the noise from the Big Bad Machines, FurFace spent most of the daylight hours hiding in the clothes dryer.

In the winter, this one-lane road gets even narrower … you can see how deep the snow is because the lower rungs of the fence (on the right) are completely covered. In the middle, you can see the stump of the bifurcated oak. After the sewer crew had passed, you'd never know it had been there … the road is twice as wide now, but it's all mud.

The roots of the twin oak … the uprooting of the stump … the aftermath of three days work. (Someday I'm going to add more photos of this oak, showing its alignment to the house and its seasonal variety.

The day I lost access to my garage … the hole beside the chicken-wire wrapped hedges … covered with steel plates and orange plastic fishnet at the end of the day.

You see, putting in the sewer lines ripped out the water lines, and there's been a temporary running on top of the ground to supply the rest of the houses on the road. So after the sewer guys have laid their pipe, the water guys have to come through and dig it all up again to lay their pipe, because they can't both lay pipe in the same hole at the same time. (Go figure! :-)