There are times when nothing seems to go according to plan and Breakup 2020 is one of those times for me. I know, I know, this year is not going according to anyone’s plans and my troubles are pretty minor compared to the massive impact the Pandemic is having on people’s lives right now, but you wouldn’t be here reading my blog if you weren’t interested in the quirks of off-grid, off-road, Alaskan living.
Today my three oldest children had to see the orthodontist and as usual they were late getting out the door for the hour and a half drive to Wasilla. My husband drew the short straw and was the one taking them. They finally took off in a hurry and got about 3/4 way up the driveway when I heard a ruckus: yelling and car doors slamming. I wondered what the heck was going on up the drive. Was it a bear? A moose? I got a phone call not long after:
“SHARON!!!”
“Why are there two huge dikes on the driveway!!?”
It seems I had forgotten to tell my darling husband about this year’s Breakup problems. You see, an artesian spring sprung up in the middle of our fucking driveway last week, and beside that the runoff from our neighbor’s property way up the hill was so massive this year, I built two dikes to divert; one to the left of the drive and the other to the right. I’ve built ghetto bridges, army bridges on the driveway before, but I’ve never had to make dikes. This year was a doozy, folks. “Did you do this!?” John yelled. Well DUH, motherfucker, are there any other Dutch people out here!?
People out here have some sort of fetish for groundwater springs. So much so that the one down the road which is piped down from the hill, the one everyone without a well from Zorab to the Lakes uses as their drinking water, landed a man in prison for 26 years (See Donald Voorhis). The truth is that all the ground water, whether it comes from a well or a spring spontaneously bubbling up, is part of the same aquifer and the same damn water. Except that my well isn’t piped down from the hill, exposed to the elements above, and isn’t exposed moose shit and beaver fever. Really, I wonder about the status of our science education some times when I hear people with perfectly good wells wax poetic about that accursed spring; the spring that almost cost my friends their life and put a man in prison for the rest of his lifetime. But it’s cool, y’all; you keep telling yourselves there is something “magical” about a spring bubbling up. To me it is nothing but an annoyance. I am a woman of hard science, especially when it comes to water quality, but you do you. And perhaps go pray to Odin and watch Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring”
And yeah, that’s totally not how this works. These fuckers just pop up when the water table changes, usually when it is high. I assure you no virgins met ill fate on my driveway. Not without my permission! I do not pray to Odin, but perhaps I should? John seems to think this spring will dissipate when the water table lowers after this high snow year, but I know enough about aquifers and how water flows to doubt that. If the spring doesn’t go away when the water table lowers, I will have to call in a professional.
So there are dikes and gullies that I built. The damn water is killing my driveway. What’s a half Dutch girl to do but build dikes?
On that note, I want to dispel any notion that there was ever a Dutch boy poking a finger into a dike to save a town. That’s just not how this works, folks. That story comes from a book, Hans Brinker, Or the Silver Skates, written by an American author, Mary Mapes Doge, in 1865. How a minor story, which is not even about the title character, became so culturally engrained, is a mystery to me. My mother’s people know about water and dikes and floods. Her people built the greatest sea barriers ever known to prevent disaster. They started on the Afsuitdijk, the enormous dam and seawall that shuts the Netherlands off from the tempestuous branch of the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, in 1927 and finished it in 1932. Sirens rang for the finishing of that project. But that wasn’t enough. In 1953 a sea flood in the South devastated the low lands (as had happened time and time again since time immemorial). It wasn’t a little boy who stuck his finger in a dike that saved 3 million people, it was Captain Evergroen who plowed his ship into the gaping hole of the dike, while others patched the gaps with sandbags that saved the southern part of the “Randstad”, the most populous area of the Netherlands, from being flooded. by plowing his boat into the broken dike while sand bags were put in to fill the rest.
Further South, the people weren’t so lucky. The dikes broke. Zeeland was flooded. Near 2000 people drowned. Their farms, their livestock, their homes…GONE. But that prompted the Dutch to build the Delta Works. Which also proved there is no reason for anything to ever flood ever again; Hello, United States, Hello New Orleans… there is NO reason for anything to ever flood again…
Captain Evergroen did not complain about the inconvenience to to him when he plowed his boat into the broken dike. He just fucking plowed his boat into that dike, because he knew that if he didn’t, potentially 3 million people would die. Y’all never knew his name before reading this, but now you do. And you want to complain about being made to wear a face mask when you go to the shops? If you are still one of the people who bitches about that, or about any minor inconvenience the measures to abate this pandemic are causing you, I want you to remember Captain Evergroen. He’s the real hero you always thought was a little Dutch boy. It takes more than a finger to plug a compromised dike.
As for us out here in the wilds, it will likely take more, much more, than my dikes to get this spring off my driveway. It will take someone like Sam McCullough and his heavy equipment. So be it. It will be expensive, but I will have to tighten the belt elsewhere. And you can wear a fucking mask. No one is asking you to ram your ship into a dike. And thank Odin, or any other God for that, because you likely would just NOT. And you would let the Randstad flood. And you would let all these people die. I see you.
