Waterline Wrangling
The Ash clock is counting down. 
Xander inspects my work at “mouse corner”; well packed with rockwool. 
Then dressed up with corner-round. And the same for the S wall and the E wall to the front door. 
The boss and I discuss saw safety when up on the mountain. 
The boss is still in-frame as I start to unload. 
A 3rd 1/3 of a cord. 
A deeper load than it looks from the front. 
Full cord in round-stack. 
Might as well dig out the waterline. 
Two old rusted out steel waterlines ran parallel; one from the house springbox, and the geysering one from up the hillside to run the yard water / corral trough. A bit bent up and cut loose. They leaked and sweated like sprinkler hoses. 
I wouldn’t want you to think I dug it out by hand. No. Here is our local WaterWitch, Dan (no relation), using his telekinetic tractor (backhoe). 
He started adding the body gesture for the kids at the local expos. It does add to the drama! 
The springbox to the house and the torn out waterlines. Prior to this E filled every container in the house with water. 
O.K. Maybe I didn’t dig it out by hand. And maybe Dan’s telekinetic skills don’t have any practical applications. It was all Dave and his amazing skills with a backhoe. The green shovel is mostly for leaning on. 
Two 50′ lengths of pex-line is laid in. One connects the springbox above to the corral; the connection is against the house springbox and is white pvc with the same still-good compression connection my Dad had put in at some point, on the other end we add a compression connection to the good steel pipe near the road that runs higher than the house-water and to the south. A filter and shut-off valve is added to the house springbox, and connects to good steel pipe just as it dives deep under the road. The pipe is like new where is hasn’t lain in the spring bog for 70 years or more. 
This is about where the upper line nests up against the springbox to the house. It took us awhile to find it… 
Dan with waterlines and Dan with the leaning shovel. 
Dave and the working shovel. 
Leaning shovel and working shovel. 
Water through a waterline! 
I zip-tie the lines together. 
Now we just have to reveal the steel lines and make our connections. 
A huge dirt covered boulder is mid frame, marking where the new line ties onto the old, about 3′ deep. 
Dave pulled back-hoe loads of heavy clay and we packed it around the water tank that I had wrapped with pond lining, as the metal is getting a bit porous. Dave then brought in clean fill-dirt from a sidehill road-cut near the corral. One more trip will cover it all. 
The water is slowly filling back in, and has just covered the new shutoff valve (yellow) and screen filter (blue). 
We try to squeeze the springbox back to round with a pair of wire stretchers after a little bump from the back-hoe. 
All the previous waterline work was done from 5pm til dusk. Now we’ll tidy things up, and Dave and Dan will head up to fix two pasture spring-box issues up on the West side. 
Dave carefully makes a half-moon in the marsh above the springbox, redirecting the spring to pool directly above the box, then percolate through the soil and into the box. It works perfectly. 
Nora does her inspections from the road. 
Old waterline bent up from the backhoe, and the big pipe is the old overflow line (now white pvc). 
Next Dave positions old concrete slab around the springbox, now opening the box no longer means standing in a bog. 
Dave and Dan head out for much more straight-forward jerbs. 
Concrete slab around the springbox. This glass beer bottle magically emerged from the ground, unbroken by the backhoe as it pulled out a long-buried wooden springbox for the house water. Other beer cans emerged from different era’s: an old triangle push-cut beer can (’50s), and few pull-tab beer cans (’60/’70s). Many eras of beer-hydration, as there were no leaning-shovels back then. 
The overflow needs me to cut a little trench, but all I have is a stick…maybe I could get the leaning shovel and… Nope. Stick.
DangerHart 