…listen
…about the music

Deep!

I am hoping that the small handful of human neighbors and the multitude of deer, foxes and raccoons within earshot of my property will forgive me for what happened today. I apologize to them all and trust that their upper partial hearing will indeed return in the near future after their little furry ears stop ringing.
A well was drilled.
Into bedrock.
Imagine what that might sound like.

I was fascinated that the house, only yards away, did not shake a millimeter throughout this ordeal. Really, a bore-deal, I suppose. The whole process is amazing. Just the thought of bearing down, down, down into the crust of the earth to gain access to precious fluids within is quite something. Rather sensual in metaphor, even. In some places on the island wells go down 700 or more feet. Ours will probably find water around 150, maybe sooner; not much further. In this case, less is definitely more.

I am slightly conflicted. There’s the positive aspect of tapping into the earth’s resource and being self-sufficient and off the grid (as we already are; just on a community well rather than one of our own until now). But then there’s an uncomfortable feeling of physically invading the orb, even just a small bit. Happily, a small bit is exactly what is used: the bore is only inches wide.

I admit that it’s unsettling to see huge machinery in the middle of one’s wooded bliss. As the truck bed and crane passed by my kitchen window I was immediately dwarfed; the scale of everything around me suddenly became tiny and the the red monster loomed larger than I could have imagined. My snapshots don’t do it justice. Watching the driver thread not one, but two enormous trucks in between hundreds of closely congregated shore pines and Doug firs was worthy of an Olympic event. The judges would give him a 6.0 across the board. Heck, I can’t even parallel park a moped.

And, in a final tip to the thankfully past-tense potential embarrassment of U.S. leadership: Drill baby, drill!