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The best Colorado citizens waste water -- the more they consume, the less water there is for new strip malls, big-box stores and cookie-cutter developments. But now that the City of Salida has water meters, I can't afford that level of civic virtue. Indeed, we were even looking for ways to cut consumption, and hit upon the notion of expanding our patio.
Adding about 180 square feet of red concrete paving blocks would mean 180 fewer square feet of lawn to water, which should save approximately 3,300 gallons a year by my rough reckoning. That's 1 percent of an acre-foot, and if every Colorado household did this, we could save 20,000 acre-feet, enough for a new city of 100,000 people to support developers, chain stores and franchises, as well as related freeway construction.
In the expansion zone, the yard sloped uphill away from the house. The patio, of course, needed to slope slightly downhill away from the house, since it does rain here every so often, and I'd rather the run-off did not find our cellar. This meant a lot of digging, starting with the sod.
That's painful, since we worked hard 14 years ago, when we bought this house, to establish grass back there in what had been a sand pile under a jungle gym for small children. And now I was removing the fruits of that labor, hoping I could find someone to give the sod to, so that I wouldn't feel guilty about killing all that perfectly good grass.
Once the sod was out of the way, there was still plenty of ground to remove. And it should be processed, rather than merely moved.
Walk down any alley in Salida, and most other mountain
towns, and when you peek into people's back yards, you'll
often see a dirt screen.
Typically, it's a wooden
frame about two feet square, covered with half-inch-mesh
hardware cloth.
When you dig dirt, you run it through the screen, which catches the rocks, of which there are plenty -- digging a mere 30-inch-deep post hole here can take the better part of a day, and the resulting excavation looks like a miniature rock-lined well.
The stuff that gets through the screen, the clean
dirt,
is carefully stored, since there will always be a
need for topsoil in this stony desert, and the rocks get
dumped.
If you've ever been on an archaeological dig, or even watched one in a movie, you'll notice that they screen their dirt, too, in the hope that they will find artifacts.
I have the same hope when I'm digging and then pushing dirt through the screen. The first hope is that some previous owner of this 1885 house had a total distrust of banks, and kept his savings -- preferably a heap of $20 double-eagle gold coins -- in a Mason jar buried in the yard, which I will hit upon.
That hasn't happened yet. Of course, if I did make such a discovery, I'd be a fool to tell anybody about it. So you're just going to have to trust me on that.
I have found three coins: all pennies, none even old enough to be of the wheat-straw variety, let alone the Indian head. I have also found two buttons, several rusted nails and bolts, half a dozen playing marbles and a handful of pottery shards, apparently from a white china saucer.
Since this rather mindless physical labor offers ample time for contemplation on these fine September days, I started wondering what a real archaeologist might make of this meager haul:
Our shallow exploratory excavation into a relatively
pristine site of the Paleomontane Suprarkansasriver Culture
revealed a frugal people, poor in material goods, but still
part of a wide-spread trading network.
The latter is indicated by the presence of many small
glass spheres, apparently made elsewhere since no evidence
of local glass-making has surfaced. Since these spheres
have no known practical use, they may have served as
trading tokens. However, it must be conceded that such
valuable items would not likely be allowed to just fall on
the ground and disappear, so another conjecture would be
useful. It is beneath consideration to theorize, as some
have proposed, that these spheres were mere children's
playthings.
As for the pottery artifacts, the remnants appear to
come from a small concave disk, perhaps used in a religious
ceremony to placate the privy demon, which is known to have
inhabited most sites of the era. The exact nature of the
ritual is still unknown, but ...
That's what happens when you spend time staring at a dirt screen, rather than a computer screen. But on these fine September days, I figure any excuse to be outdoors is a good one, and besides, there won't be as much lawn to water and mow,
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