Part of the story of Smudge and me is a tale of two bladders, hers and mine. Pretty much every night, sometime around 2am, one of us hears nature’s call. If it’s her, she’ll come over and paw at me until I stir and take her outside.
In the interest of efficiency, I take advantage of the moment and join her.
If, on the other hand, I’m the one in need of relief, she’ll follow me with a “Gee, Dad, as long as you’re up” look. We have that kind of relationship.
When the happy Heeler tapped on my arm at 2:10am this morning, it was raining hard. I suited up, clipped the leash to her collar and led her down the steps to the driveway. She spun around a couple of times, decided she could hold her water and dashed straight back to the door.
“My dog does Number Five. That’s three Ones and a Two.”
George Carlin
In our world, 5am is wake-up time. That’s when Deb’s alarm goes off and I pour my first cup of coffee. And this morning, it was when Smudge and her bladder asked for another business trip.
Rain was coming down even harder than before.
I commanded the pup to do what she was there to do. She just stood there. Looking up at me, squinting unhappily in the driving rain, she conveyed a clear message — “The hell I will!”
Miss Smudge didn’t have a productive outing ’til almost 9am. Our girl Scout, by contrast, a 14-year veteran of inclement weather, handled her business quickly, first trip of the day.
I guess it’s a tale of two dogs, too.
Waves of heavy rain trained over The Mountain last night, bringing downpour after downpour well into the daylight hours. None of it came in the form of storms, though — torrents simply were steady, soaking.
I stepped outside around 11am into a light rain, the last of what we’d see from this once-tropical system. The ground was saturated but I saw no ponding, which meant that our parched earth got exactly what it needed.
The rain gauge showed 3-7/8 inches since early yesterday afternoon. Almost all of that had fallen within the last 14 hours.
In terms of rain catchment — and you knew I’d go there — if our cabin roof was set up for harvesting, and if we had the capacity to collect it all, we could’ve realized almost 1,500 gallons of fresh water. To put that in terms of the types of vessels we have now, it could’ve filled five IBC totes, plus two water-storage barrels. And one Homer bucket.
Whenever I do those calculations, often I forget that the cabin eventually will have a porch, too, and its roof — figuring 26 feet by 5 feet, with a slight overhang — could increase our volume by 23%.
That would’ve bumped this potential harvest to nearly 1,800 gallons.
Yes, there’ll be an up-front investment involved in our collecting rainwater. Maintaining the system will take time, too, along with modest sums for filters, sanitizing chemicals and so forth. But the water itself will be free.
Most important, none of that water will rely on grid power to draw it from our well or a public utility to pump it to our address. That kind of private control and independence motivates us to make it part of our setup on The Mountain.
It’s also why so many states ban or heavily regulate rain catchment. It’s totally outside of government control.
But back to the present day — we just got a whole bunch of rain that we (and our neighbors) desperately needed. The average for the whole month of July ’round here is only 2.6 inches, and nine days in we’re already 50% ahead of that.
Our Tuesday afternoon was dry. I took the Ranger down the road to see if we have any washouts. We don’t — in fact, I think whatever the runoff carried into previously eroded stretches actually smoothed them out a bit.
It’s a dirt road, a bona fide Country road. We have vehicles that can handle it, and if it’s a little off-putting to some folks, well, that suits us just fine.
Between the end of our driveway and the northeast corner of our property, I saw six whitetails — three does, two fawns and a buck. Five separate sightings, all headed toward the high ground.
I’ve seen deer move like that before, after a heavy rain or when an unseasonably warm day melts snow pack. An old hunter once told me why — they’re following fresh water to its source, upslope to where it’s clean and cold.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that I live now where I see such things almost every day, notice them and begin to understand the warp and woof of this special place.
But I do.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB