Today we went back into ujiko mode. The next big step for Monaca Doken is to set the drains around the barn. It’s going to involve a lot of hand-digging and after the mess of groundwater yesterday, I think we all want this to go well.
But a piece of information about the height and placement of the septic tank is missing and so we sort of spent the day dancing around the ujiko tasks. And in doing so, we solved a mystery.
Yesterday, we noticed an additional junction covered by weeds under the pussy willow by the barn. What? Where does it lead? We investigated, pouring buckets of water and following from junction to junction. And that led us to the Big Hole.
In the driveway by the falling down shed, just where you turn into Blueberry Road, there is a pile of rusting metal covering a hole topped by an old gas can marking the spot. “Do not drive here,” it warns. I always give it a wide berth.
Arriving here in our water chase the guys took up the metal lids (and a cabinet door, it looked like) to reveal a hole packed with rubble and mud but no water trickling through from the drainage channel. Hmm. They pulled out the rubble and found the ujiko somewhat lower and to the left of the hole. It had a chunk taken out of it and we could see the water running through this channel. The water flowed through to next junction about a meter further down the driveway.
Was someone clumsily trying to repair or unclog the channel at some point in the past? Perhaps. We chalked it up to “gomiyama syndrome” where trash is discarded in random piles and tasks are done without much care for the future.
The future is now, as they say, so we fixed the hole. Sakaguchi-san sprinkled in a bag of dry cement, mixing it with clay soil dredged up from yesterday’s levelling. He pounded it into all the crevices and closed up the cracked ujiko with a chunk of rubble. Abe-san trundled over multiple wheelbarrows of clay, dirt, stones and gravel stone filled the hole. It was a big hole!
Shimizu-san scraped away the accumulated dirt and grass and we topped the repair with the gas can. It’s still not for driving on until we get some more cement on it which we can do when the foundations are poured.
I think this sort of work is the “knitting a horse” procrastination of construction teams. My favorite kind.
