The Lake House: Driveway and "The Wall"

It's time that the folks who made our new home happen get some love. So, here with the first post about them and what they've created for us.

Walls hold up our buildings, define our prisons, won't get built on a certain border after all, and provide extraordinary, sometimes terrible, sometimes awe inspiring, impressions. Diego Rivera's mural on a wall of the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, for example, left me slack jawed, drugged by its detail and raw energy. Berlin's notorious and awful Wall was the centerpiece of my stint as an army infantryman in that city in the '70s and taught me life long lessons about what is and is not free. And the walls built by the Inca, these at Machu Picchu, intricate and ambitious, spoke to our family in timeless, mysterious tones. Each wall with its purpose, grand or foul.

And so it is with our wall, here dwarfing 5' 11" Conor, formed, boulder by boulder to hold tight the cut into the land that forms our steep driveway to the house below. But, of course, the driveway and wall didn't just happen.

First, it makes sense to look at the piece of land on the lake as we found it. Apparently, it had been logged a hundred years ago or so. There are signs that here, as with the rest of this part of the peninsula, the trees were mighty. This nursery stump, now near the edge of our patio, gives us an idea of what used to grow here. The Douglas fir was huge when it was sawed off by lumberjacks using a spring board stuck into cuts still visible in the tree to get up high enough to use those big old long two person crosscut saws. That's a healthy cedar happily spreading its roots over the top of the old fir stump.

The really big trees are gone, replaced by what we found when we first set foot on this property. Daunting overgrowth, steep ground, with delicious lake views in there somewhere. One did not "stroll" down to the lake from the spot where the road ended in the middle of these three acres. One climbed over, climbed under, side stepped, slipped, grasped, stumbled and, finally, you'd get to a place where you were pretty sure there was a lake through the trees. The goal was to get a house down there and a way to get down to it, although not in that order.

It was up to Kevin, Samuel, and Josiah Rodman, aka Eden Excavating, to join with builder extraordinaire James Schouten to find the line, carve the driveway, shore it up, and sculpt a shelf where a house could actually be built down near (35 feet back from) the water. I still can't believe that they did it.

As much as we hated it, some trees had to go. Watching professionals (also Kevin, Sam, and Joe) fell, limb, and buck these trees was a whole new thing for us. I know that this is old hat around these parts but the obvious danger, the efficiency, the ability to work fast and safely with large chainsaws, excavators, lord knows what else; it is all a wonder. Samuel skittering a hundred feet in the air, chainsaw dangling, Josiah bouncing along a downed tree limbing, also with chainsaw, as if without effort, trees looking like huge sticks wrestled about by huge machines. It was amazing to see. They took care to treat the harvested trees with care so that, now, we have the gratifying pleasure of being able to use the downed Douglas fir from this plot for the beams in the house. As they tried to remove the stumps, it became clear that the biggest challenges were going to be found below ground. The place is jam-packed with boulders and the trees had been anchoring around those rocks for decades. Check out that photo below.

And so the story of the boulders began. Hundreds of them had to be dug up, broken up, or dodged just to scrape off enough dirt to make the 20ish foot cut to get a usable road down to the house site. The first photo in this post is of Samuel working an excavator, pounding a jackhammer the size of an arm to break up boulders that threatened to derail the digging for the foundation of the house. When not smashing the big ones to bits they grabbed and scraped the many, many others with massive excavator claws, grasping at fat rocks that resisted as if intentionally fighting with Sam or Kevin or Joe. The guys won, and there were piles of the boulders everywhere.

Here are Sharlene and Boo beside one of the big boys that wouldn't budge, who knows how far down it goes; but it fit well enough with the land sculpting that they didn't have to try to break it up.

Digging the driveway left this deep, bare cut. Between the excavation for the driveway and the foundation site, they'd expected to remove 35 or so dump truck loads of dirt. They ended up removing 200 plus loads. As they made their way deeper into the hillside they ran into that gray slash of stuff in the photo on the left. There is a larger close up below because this was fascinating.

There, 20 feet or so below the surface, poking out of a clay-like gray slash that didn't look like the rest of the dirt, was part of a tree. We're guessing that it was buried there a few thousand years ago, maybe by one of the rockslides that separated Lake Sutherland from its spectacular mother, Lake Crescent. Maybe not but it had been preserved as a tree, still organic, and cool as heck.

They also discovered sand along where the bottom of the wall was to be. That meant we were going to need a big, unanticipated, expensive French drain running down the driveway along the base of that wall. Boy, was that an exciting day! But here is what they did with it.

It was really something to watch. They set out a boulder walled trench, laid the drain pipe, filled above the pipe with riprap, then constructed the wall, boulder by boulder, adding more rubble and rock behind the wall as it climbed. Sam and Nate Thompson figured the line for the wall and worked the jigsaw puzzle of boulders. Nate wrote on Sam's Facebook page that, while the wall was being built, he was seeing boulders spinning in his sleep. Sam plucked those big stones up, with Josiah guiding him in when necessary, and set them down with a precision and flair that, while not quite Inca, is a work of art.

We'd watch at the progress for a while most days, then come evening, with all the machines quiet, hanging around like angular, painted dinosaurs resting between meals, we'd go back, often cooking on a fire between the excavators and the boulders, trying out some new wine, and stumbling (due to the footing, not the wine) around the day's newest hill or pile of this and that, wondering how in the world they could possibly make all of this happen.

But make it happen they did, and that boulder wall we had never envisioned is the startling introduction to the drive down the hill to our home. It is also the double take inducing subject of every glance out of the non-lake side windows. Amazing.

We couldn't appreciate the Eden Crew more.

That's Kevin, staring down a stump the size of Montana. Sam and Josiah are his boys and you get the sense that there isn't much Kevin can't figure out.

There's Sam, stepping away from his "brush." He handles these machines like they were toys.

That's Josiah with Shar, he seems to do some of everything.

Thanks guys. That wall, and so much more of this place we are enjoying so much, is a monument to y'all.