How to Help Birds

This is not a good picture but it illustrates what birds want during this droughty autumn-styled-winter: water. There are three birds, robins, crowded on the clay water dish and another, on the left, flying in. Right next to this water stand/bird bath is the hanging cake of suet that used to be the star attraction at my bird buffet. No longer. The very second I put some water out, birds surrounded the water, perching, drinking, flapping, flying in. Birds are thirsty. No wonder they'd rather eat berries than suet or seed.

Set out a dish or bowl of water if you love your wild creatures. For them it's in short supply.

Meanwhile I don't dare start up a nice cozy outdoor fire. The other day I panicked seeing thick woodsmoke crossing Highway FF but it was a homeowner -- I could see him -- burning leaves and wisely attending to the fire. Lack of water is not only causing thirst but the woods are a tinderbox.

Port-a-Fortune

Leaking water heater sops the towels that I cover the floor with. Changed em once a day, now change em twice a day. Disaster is imminent. Handyman Darryl says the reason the place is going to hell in a handbasket is that I live here all the time, don't I ever travel around the world or something and leave him to shut off the water supply and update the bathroom and this whole house? And he strongly hinted I ought to.

So I did look into world travel, but can't afford to go gallivanting even to Wisconsin for ten days to two weeks, and furthermore don't want to -- this is the only place in the world I want to be -- so thought about renting a portable outhouse for the duration of in-home construction. Emailed for a quote on the simplest model. It costs $120/per. It didn't say "per" what, but studying it hard I realized it costs $120 per DAY to rent a port-a-potty. Pardon me, but since the facilities would be outdoors anyhow, an empty coffee can makes more financial sense.

Robidoux Springs

You can't see but the bubbles, but there's a scuba diver in the water, and these kids wanted desperately to see if he was ever going to come back up, and how cool it would be if he didn't; this is the diver (I had permission to take his picture) who also had an underwater camera. He told me it was murky down there from recent rain, no good for photos that day -- but there's a huge and complicated cave under there that cave-certified divers can explore. This is at Robidoux Springs in Waynesville, MO, one of several scuba-diving spots in the great state of Missourah.

There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town

Taken in Bourbon, MO. There's another one, too, in case this one runs out.

Got Water?

Sunday I get up and the water heater's leaking. Oh mercy. Mopped it up. Had to shut off the valve to the house and phone the handyman on his day off. He'll be here tomorrow morning. To get water today I make do, stepping outside to the pump house with some saucepans and buckets. I consider this a great privilege, not the holy terror it is when the plumbing's not working in the city.

Too bad I couldn't wash clothes or dishes or floors today. Instead, I relaxed and saw a rose-breasted grosbeak I will try to photograph for you.

The Rain Barrel Solution

Well water is so darn hard it grays my skin and hair. Recent rains also made the water stinky. I thought, get a softener, a purifier. After spending the evening with Culligan et al., turns out that water gets softened by pumping it through salt, or, the "salt-free" alternative, potassium.

Laundry and dishwater here drain off the limestone cliff twenty foot down into The Secret Pond, right now chock-full of Spring Peepers, and I'll be dad-blamed if I'll salt and shrivel them and everything around them. Besides, there's no room for two tanks and 40-lb. bags of salt, and needless to say there ain't several thousand dollars.

I could get a counter-top water distiller if I had a countertop and lots of wattage to keep the thing steaming -- and if I wanted an all-year, 24-hour Turkish bathhouse in place of a kitchen.

Bottled water is a choice, but not for showers or laundry. Reverse osmosis is slow, and 4 or 5 gallons of water are wasted for every osmosis gallon you get.

Then I remembered my granddad in Park Falls, WI, in the early 1960s, had a rain barrel. I lined two 5-gallon paint buckets with trash bags and now after it's rained I have soft water, the old-fashioned way, to sponge off with or to stick my head into post-shampoo. Yeah, it's cold. But it's natural, cheap, and I aint no sissy.

Waterfall #3

This waterfall is just a few yards above Waterfall #1.

Waterfall #1

Yesterday's strange heavy rains inspired this first in a series of portraits of the 5 waterfalls on the Divine property, which is in the Meramec watershed. This waterfall plunges into a perfectly circular, stony-bottomed pond. I find waterfalls to be very sensual.

The 20-Foot Waterfall

Back in the woods is an intermittent stream. On its way to LaBarque Creek, the stream makes a leap and then plunges down a sluice, 20 to 25 feet in length, that in size and shape resembles a water slide, and ends in a fresh cold pool. The way to get there and see it as I did today is to bushwhack through steep, rocky, jungly, and pathless Eastern Ozark terrain. Or you can see the photos, the first I've ever taken of this secret, unnamed waterfall.

Learning from Well Water

Before the electric pump draws it up into daylight, the well water here has had a long and mysterious career. Fabulously icy, and stony-sweet, it’s divine -- and as hard as nails. It's taught me this:

1. For calcification around fixtures, spray with 50 percent vinegar, let it sit, wipe like you mean it, and then – wearing eye protection -- use a kitchen knife to chip off what remains.
2. Rinse hair and face with bottled water or rainwater to stave off ratty “stonewashed” hair and ashy skin.
3. A “stonewashed” effect will suffuse all your fabrics eventually. Laundering them inside out will help them last a bit longer.
   
4. Drinking glasses will look like you just drank milk from them unless you use a dishwasher armed with Jet-Dry. Alternately, buy drinking glasses by the case, or explain to your company that the glasses aren’t really dirty, that you honestly did wash them, that the hard water clouds them up. Hard water also wears out glass so that it breaks more easily.
5. Use a filtration pitcher for most of your drinking and cooking. Your coffeepots and pans will last longer. Filter the water you give to pets.
6. In your sink or washtub, detergent will look not sudsy but like scum. The harder the water, the less suds you get. But the detergent is still working. The fact is that sudsing agents are added to detergents and shampoos merely for show. Hard water fights on the side of reality. I find that fantasizing about luxurious lather is almost as good as the real thing.

Heart Like a Rain Gauge

Ace climbs water towers and sets water pressure for small towns. His van is packed with tools and straps and ladders and gauges, including a Geiger counter. He showed me how some of gauges worked. The indicator needles jumped and held. "See these?" he said. "They don't lie."

I was amazed. Surely those things lie. Somehow. I keep testing my tire pressure over and over because I usually don't credit, at first, what the gauge says. But Ace makes a living by trusting his gauges, so he must be right: What gauges say is the reality.

Here's my rain gauge, sort of like a footlong shot glass, and its view of what fell last night: one and one-half inches of rain. This isn't good news for this part of Missouri. But it's a reality. Plans must be made for the rivers rising again this week. People are murmuring "Flood of '93," "Flood of '82." Makes an individual feel very small and feeble, and makes the heart beat harder.