New Fountain

Over the years, I've attempted to have some kind of water feature in our back yard.  I like them because the stillness of the liquid when the fountain is off provides an anchor to the landscaping, and also the sound of falling water helps to mask things like the rituals (or whatever it is) that the eight-year-old girls are doing two houses over.

For a while we had a little solar-powered fountain, which was nice in a bird-bath kind of way, and which the cats appreciated during the hot summer months, but which was more of a novelty than an actual water feature (also, it required a lot of fiddling with to keep the solar panel pointed at the sun).

When the large plastic, semispherical planter we'd been using for a fountain basin fatigued and cracked, we did without a fountain last summer, and the cats drank from a metal, shallow, shell-shaped basin (which was fine until I started to wonder if any lead solder or something decorative was leeching into their water supply).

This year I finally got enough gumption (and savings) together to get a more industrial-strength fountain.  I'd been skulking around a local landscaping shop, scoping out things like basalt columns and fountain basins for a few weeks.

Saturday, I dragged Mark to the shop to help choose a rock and fountain.  My fantasy would be to plunk ten-foot tall basalt columns at the cardinal points of the yard and install a baptismal-font sized column in the west with a brook-sized current of water springing out of it.  But, as just one ten-foot tall basalt column A) costs something on the order of $2000.00 and B) weighs easily two tons, and as I have not mastered Merlin's spells for moving the menhirs of Stonehenge, it seemed rather impractical.  Even a foot high basalt "bird bath" weighs around 300 pounds, so I ended up with something lighter (at an estimated 200 lbs) -- half a basalt column, cut at slightly inclined angle and polished.  It has a hole through its long axis for water to well out through.  I'm expecting the polished face will reflect the sun and be useful for telling the solar time.

The shop sold plastic reservoirs that are sturdy enough to hold about 500 pounds, a water pump, some tubing, and various piping features.  It all weighed in beneath our car's carrying capacity, and soon Mark and I had all of the stuff home (well, okay, we still need to get some fist-sized decorative stones to put around the column, but that's for later).

We had watched the guys at the shop load the column into the car and privately wondered how many years of lifting 200 pound rocks would result in a slipped spinal disc or something.  In our driveway, after a few abortive attempts at rock wiggling, we looked at the column, sitting on its side in the back of the car.  It didn't look impressive, and driving around town with a essentially a stone battering ram wasn't high on my list of things to do.

After about ten minutes of wiggling, fiddling around with various planks and levers of wood, we managed to maneuver the stone into a position where it would perch on the car's tailgate.  Then we carefully managed to slide it down a plank and into a waiting wagon (yes, we braced the wagon's wheels so it wouldn't roll forward).

Mark announced that he wasn't going to move the stone any farther without some proper equipment... which is probably wise, considering that various lumbar and scapula parts of my body reminded me Sunday (the day after) that they're over half a century old.  Unfortunately, I don't know a troupe of burly men who want to do a historical reenactment of moving Stonehenge stones.

The next step was fountain basin placement.  The original site I'd had in mind, right off of the deck's steps, was too cramped.  I thought about placing the basin due west of the lawn circle, but that plan was vetoed because it would harm plants and probably become a magnet for arbor vitae tree needles.  So it ended up next to the bonsai shelter.

Sunday.  Since our entire yard tilts along a southeast to northwest axis, I had to dig out a little bit of the ground to get a level site for the fountain.  Mark wanted me to put down pavers, too, on the theory that they would help to keep things level when the ground shifts because there's a 200 pound basalt column and (8 inches X 17inches ^2 X pi = 7263 ^3 inches ) 262 pounds of water on top of it.

One trip to the paver store later, I was digging a hole, and then pounding the bottom flat with a concrete paver and singing the Ewok Cooking Song, "Lukan Dukan Lu-la ..." And digging some more.  And pounding more.  And then laying pavers down and seeing if they were level.  Then picking them back up.  And pounding the ground (which has a high clay content).  And pinching my fingertips.  And singing some more.  And leveling.  And pounding.  And ripping a cuticle off of my thumb.  And trying to find more places to put the extra dirt.

At some point my rendition of the Ewok Cooking Song was interrupted by Mark, who said that he and the child were going on a walk.

Eventually, I managed to get the hole as deep enough, and as level enough, and wide enough to put the basin in.

Of course, I had to fill it with water, plunk the water pump in and plug it in.  No one got electrocuted or anything -- and when I turned it on, The Child said, "It looks like The Bellagio."  Mark started humming, "Con Te Partiro (Time to Say Goodbye)."

The installation was not finished, but it was getting dark, Mark wanted to go look at freshwater mammals at Delta Ponds, and my hands were hurting.  So we paused.  The next steps are getting the proper rock-moving tools, hiring an electrician to install an outside electrical outlet (to allay Mark's fears of some electrical catastrophe), and adding some decorative rocks to the top so the basin doesn't look like a giant's lost watering can spout came loose and fell into our back yard.