The Easy Life

If anything has proven to be the bane of my Beaver Lake existence, it is water. Pumping, storing and freeze-protecting the water, to be specific. Living on a lake, one might think the problem to be relatively straight-forward to resolve. I would have agreed, and did, shrugging it off with a no-big-deal pronouncement. I mean, we only use about 300 gallons of water per month for all our needs, so we’re not talking some mega-scale operation here. And what follows is a very typical story of how wrong I usually am about most things that involve re-inventing wheels, or rather, taking a wheel from a tractor and putting it on a Volkswagen, because nobody makes exactly what it is we need… and when that doesn’t exactly work out, trying several semi-successful iterations on the theme until finally taking an entirely new and equally-likely-to-succeed tack. This particular story is from our third winter, so I’m bringing you up to speed on my water miseries mid-course. I’ll tell those early stories, too, if this all works out.

This story is pretty long, and all of it,I’m sorry to say, is true. This is part one of this particular story, and I decided to illustrate it with a series of pics my brother sent when I was in the hospital two summers past. They were all captioned “why women live longer than men”, and are true to the spirit of this tale.

After our second winter, and dozens of 200’ popsicles littering our backyard that spring (another story in itself of trying to pump 32.5 degree water from the lake uphill through 10 degree cold water lines, followed by a week of minus 20 degree weather, during which a temporary system was frantically set up with a 350 gallon tank inside the cabin for the rest of the winter), I decided we needed to set our water storage tank underground. The 1000 gallon plastic tank then in use sat on a platform on the hillside above the cabin and the outhouse. The tank and its’ surrounding insulation and connections resembled… uhmmmm…, ok, imagine if you gave a bunch of fifth graders a pick-up load of duct-tape and access to the local dump and asked them to build a life-size mock-up of the 1969 Lunar Landing Module. Pretty much exactly like that.

Somehow, the following summer and its delightful weather came and went before the coming winter finally put my back to the wall, and I had to set about making up a new water tank storage and delivery design, and bury the beast in the front yard. It was nearly Thanksgiving, and Wendy was away for a week at a conference, and I thought this would be a good time to dismantle the old and install the new. Step one was renting a large track-hoe from the nearest town to do the excavation. I got the biggest one they let you haul with your own vehicle… in my case, a one-ton diesel crewcab with a bed hitch, so I got a pretty sizeable excavator for the job. After picking it up late Saturday afternoon, I decided to stay in town and watch our Montana college rivalry football game, instead of heading straight home. Getting in to our cabin from the end of the gravel county road requires traveling the last four miles on un-maintained state forest roads. The forest road had been lightly snow-covered mud, soft and wet when I left for town earlier that day. By the time I was rolling back in after the game that night, it had frozen up solid and slick. About two miles in on the forest road, on a slight upgrade, I lost forward momentum despite being in 4wd. The truck stopped, then slowly began picking up speed in reverse direction, pulled backward by a twenty-ton excavator. I made a quick decision to derail the train before I picked up any more speed, and cut the wheel hard right, sending the excavator (followed by my truck) about twenty yards over the edge of the road embankment. The only thing that stopped us from continuing down the slope was a huge old tree stump. I surveyed the mess, then walked the last two miles home to grab a beer and two sets of tire chains and tow chains and slog it all back to my truck. It was about 11 o’clock by the time I finally got my truck uncoupled from the trailer. I was soaked and freezing by then, the temp already below 20, so I headed home for something hot to eat.

This time of year is peak hunting season in Montana, and I knew the next morning before sunrise there would be hunters coming in this road, and I needed to get back to the excavator to try and haul it up on the road before the area got too much traffic. So at three a.m. I got back at it. I managed to set up a multi-point z-rig with chains, pulleys and cables, and with my prized hydraulic winch (many stories to be told by that piece of equipment) managed to pull the entire truck/excavator/trailer unit back up on the road before the hunters started filtering in. “Phew!” I thought, I lost a nights’ sleep, but I’ve got the excavator home and ready to go, right on schedule. (Seriously, I’m idiotically optimistic in that way, unable to heed premonition when whacked in the face with it).

The first job was to move the tank off of the rickety platform it had been sitting on since last fall. (I guess this is as good a place as any to mention that I failed to calculate the total weight of 1000 gallons of water before placing the tank on that slope in the first place… ummm, turns out it’s over 16,000 lbs… ). To make things just a little more challenging this day, the tank still had about three hundred gallons of water in it that had not been drained out, (remember how somehow summer came and went?) and now it is a 5000 lb ice cube in the bottom of the tank. No worries, though, I have a mighty excavator at my disposal. I hooked up a chain through the tank’s top opening and around a series of large timbers bolted together inside the tank. I picked up the chain with the bucket of the excavator, lifted the tank neatly, and as I swung the tank toward its’ new resting place, the timbers snapped. The tank was high in the air, almost directly above the outhouse… oh…, no…, not that… and miraculously, the tank thudded to the ground, missing our outhouse (yay!) and bouncing back up into the air, heading downhill, picking up speed, and bouncing, bounding, … right into my waiting truck. The right side, the side I had just, the previous week, had the body work done to. I guess truck doors are supposed to have dents (large ones) and broken mirrors held on with duct tape. The universe apparently demands it. That’s ok. Besides, the collision with the truck broke up the ice cube in the tank, and now the tank can be emptied. Yay!, says the Idiot.

Next job at hand is to set the tank in an eight foot deep hole in the ground I’ve just dug, with a little extra space on one side to access the pump hose coming out from the bottom (thinking ahead on such projects is not always my forte, so I’m bragging here). To make it easier to re-fill the excavation after setting the tank, I’ve left the dirt from the excavation piled up around the opening. I also hope this will aid in getting the tank to drop straight down into the hole and rest on its bottom, not on its side. After struggling to get the tank in place over the hole, it doesn’t want to drop in place. Puzzled, I look around all edges, but can’t see the problem. I enter the excavation from the little dugout area for the pump access, and inspect the bottom of the tank and the edges of the hole. I reach up and yank on a little rock, and the tank snuggles neatly into place. And man, is it heavy, sitting there on my chest. The only thing keeping the tank from sitting level on the bottom now is me. Personally. Physically. I’m on my back, and the tank is resting solidly on top. Hmmm. It’s Sunday. Wendy is due home Wednesday, I think. That’s a long time. And I get bored easily. Since the bottom of the hole was leveled off with back-fill first, I’m able to move a few loose rocks around with my finger tips. I keep at it until I can move my whole hand around, then move an arm around a bit. Eventually, I have enough of a depression that I can begin to twist my body and legs around until I am face down. At that point, I am able to pull my knees slowly up and lift the tank little by little off my body. I move rocks around some more, and am able to block up the tank about a foot on one side, and wriggle over to the opening I came in through. At this point, I am freezing from being underground for so long, and head in for heat, food and rest. I still need to put a roof support structure over the tank before I put dirt over the entire thing, or else it might collapse the tank in. It is not an underground tank by design, but I figure I can work around that problem. I am so tired, however, that I decide to call it a night and get up early. Tomorrow I’ll build the support cover over the tank, and use the excavator to push the dirt back in place and then get the excavator delivered back to town before 9:30 a.m. No problem. The hard stuff is done. Yay!, says the Idiot, again.

I push myself out of bed well before sunrise, and make coffee. I step outside in the early morning twilight to finish this job, and… the tank is… gone. I go over and peer in the hole, and I cannot see anything there at all except a hole. Not enough coffee? I fire up the excavator and swing the lights around to shine on the hole. It still makes no sense. The hole I dug was eight feet around and eight feet deep, and the tank I put in it was eight feet across and six feet tall. The hole was still at least five feet deep now, and covered with loose dirt at the bottom. As the caffeine starts to do its prescribed job, I start to realize that the dirt piled up around the edge of the hole has caved in the edges of the hole, filled in on top of the tank, and imploded the thing. The 1000 gallon tank will now hold maybe 200 gallons? Great. My only thought is, will more coffee and the light of day make this situation seem better or worse?

I use the excavator to carefully, carefully remove as much dirt as I can off of the imploded tank. I’ve only got an hour now to load up the excavator and get it back to town. As I swing the bucket around to head down to the truck and trailer, the excavator breaks loose and starts sliding down the hill on the ice. I swing the arm back around and drop the bucket quickly, smartly stopping the run-away excavator and cleanly knocking the tailgate off my pick-up. Clearly, I have professional potential. And I return the excavator to town without causing a single fatality.

The rest of the job will require a lot of manual labor, but I am not dissuaded. Surely the potential for collateral damage is reduced without having heavy machinery at my disposal. Says the Idiot. Again.

I jump down on top of the imploded tank, shuffle around the remaining rocks and dirt, and unscrew the man-hole cover. There is a little channel inside the crushed tank that leads to the bottom, and I hang upside down into the tank and peer in with a flashlight. Amazingly, the tank hasn’t split anywhere, and is neatly accordioned in on itself. There is about two feet of height inside the tank now, and I decide to try and reverse the implosion by crawling inside and putting some hydraulic jacks under timbers and unfolding the tank by raising and blocking the ceiling with jacks and timbers. Although it was a time consuming process, it was working pretty well. I had the thing ¾ of the way back to its original shape, when one of the timbers slipped off its jack. The next scene was from every cartoon you have ever seen of things bouncing and ricocheting off of walls at high speed in a confined space. I played the part of the google-eyed Idiot, and the steel jacks and timbers played the part of the hilariously, impossibly fast objects exchanging impossible trajectories, as the tank went back to its two-foot high volume.

Well, can’t get it done from the inside? I decide to build a heavy spanning beam across the top of the hole, set a large u-bolt in top of the tank, and using a winch and pulleys, I’ll pop the tank back open from the outside. Easy. What could possibly go wrong????

Stay tuned for part two, featuring an unintentionally exploding improvised device, scuba gear, unintentional indoor fireworks display, my first experience as a high-voltage light-emitting-diode, and a brief meeting with the Creator. And finally, a well-deserved hot bath.