PIPE DREAMS NIGHTMARES

From our home, the meadow drops down a long, steep hill into the wetlands. Long ago a levee was put in halfway down the hill to dam up a pond. For 25 years it’s been a big, beautiful body of water teeming with fish, water birds, dragonflies, and aquatic plants.

Iowa water levels are anything but static. We had a drought one summer, and the pond became a big puddle. We feared for the animals within. And then came the floods and suddenly we owned the sixth Great Lake. 

The pond is held back by the levee or back wall, and it’s a good sized levee––30 feet across in most places. There even used to be a little road on top of it (for the hunters) but we let it grow wild with trees and bushes. As the pond began to rise last summer, we worried that the levee would break through and our pond would drain. The thought of that insult to the landscape and wetlands and the dying fish and other animals was sickening.

The water continued to rise up the levee, pressing on it. It was now 15 feet deep.There is a built in feature to handle high water levels. About a yard down from the top of the levee is an overflow pipe. It’s a good-sized pipe, about 8 inches across. When the water gets that high, it flows into the pipe, through the levee and down into the wetlands below. We bought the land in 1993, year of the 500-year flood in Iowa. That pipe produced a surprisingly powerful waterfall for weeks on end. The wetlands

grew into a shallow lake.

Last summer, the 500-year flood came again, and the water rose well above the pipe. We were getting constant rain and very poor outflow. It was time to act. I took a few tools and headed to the hill down below our pond to check the far end of the drainage pipe.

Turns out, the pipe was nowhere to be seen. There was just a small trickle of water (I sincerely hoped it was water) bubbling up through the soil. I dug near the trickle, and it increased. Our pipe was buried somewhere in there.

I dug about a foot into the bank. The water was now coming from the left, so I dug in that direction. Soon I had a hole a St. Bernard could hide in.

The shovel finally hit metal. I unearthed the end of the pipe, but the water flow was still puny. Something was plugging up the system.  I could get a long branch to go in about a foot, and then it hit a hard blockage.

Hey––I’m a nurse; who better to undo a blockage? I went back to the house and fetched the long-handled extension pole I use to dust the beams. (see Feb. 6th entry)

To get good leverage, I positioned myself about a yard below the end of the pipe. The end of the pipe was now about at eye level. Behind me, the hill was covered with slippery mud where the water ran down to the swamp. The hill is so steep that it’s difficult to maintain footing even when it’s dry, but I had to straddle that mud river while also straddling the extension pole/ramrod.

I jammed the pole hard against that obstruction. Nothing moved. I whacked at it with all my strength. It did not budge. Periodically I had to grab an overhead branch when I’d start to slip down the hill.

And then, after one more jab, something gave. Just a titch. And ever so slowly, a brown object began to emerge from the pipe. It slid out about a foot, but I still could not identify it. The water flow was improving around it, so my feet were slipping around in moving, watery slop.

All of the above events took about an hour and a half. All of the events below took about 3 seconds.

The brown, hard cylinder turned out to be about a yard long. I found this out when it suddenly shot out of the pipe and ripped right through my legs. It sailed with the full force of a summer’s worth of caged up water behind it, freed at last. After passing underneath me, it hit the hillside, ripped about 50’ down to the wetlands, and disappeared underwater. 3 seconds. No more.

That object was a well-cured muskrat who had attempted to swim through our overflow pipe sometime in the last year and was now a mummified hairy spear. It could have turned me into a human donut had I not leaped up and grabbed the branch above me. After it passed through my legs, I hung on that branch with my feet running in place on the mud slick––much like Wiley Coyote before he gains traction. I hung on for dear life because the waterfall would have carried me swiftly down the hill and into wetlands history.

I don’t know how he manages it, but my husband always meanders home right after the party’s over. He stood on the deck and watched me limp up the hill with my extension pole, my hair, face, and clothing totally breaded in mud. Maybe he didn’t know what I was.

“Fixed the overflow,” I said, gasping. “Muskrat. Dead. Shot under me. Had to hang in the tree.”

“Well, that’s great,” he said. “It’s working, then. Want some tacos?”

For more on making a pond:

http://pubs.ext.vt.edu/420/420-011/420-011.html

For more on muskrats:

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Ondatra_zibethicus.html