The Rain Gardens

My grandfather used to steal from our country. That is to say, on fishing trips he would fill the bottom of his boat with flagstone and any other boulders he found interesting, bring them home, and build rock gardens, rain gardens, paths, streams, and other water features around his big hillside property. As a seventeen year old Marine during WWII he had been handed some rather gruesome orders, so I like to imagine he called it even.

There was little more fascinating to me as a young boy than creeks. Adults never seemed to want to be in them, and there the earth privately showed you, in microcosm, how she cast her spell through time, in the form of frogspawn animating with satisfying progress each new afternoon. A stolen box of zip-top sandwich bags, fashioned into sandbags for damming, awakened a child's love of both fluid engineering and personal agency outside of the home, and many of us even got exciting infections from mucking around in water that had flowed for miles through the schools, golf courses, and industrial districts of town.

When Grandpa Dan switched on the water for his first creek, a meandering run perhaps thirty feet long, I watched in reverence as its foremost fingers shyly felt their way around the river stones and jagged outcroppings of lava, toward the hidden drain that would pump them back to their headwaters. By his front door he placed a massive stone specimen into which he drilled three holes, and he plumbed it so water would rise through them and cascade down its crevasses during holiday parties. There's a family photo of me with my brother and sister, sitting on that rock a very long time ago, with the water bubbling up.

When we got the fixer-upper last year, I eyed a barren spot of yard that begged for a meaningfully large water feature. As has been recorded elsewhere, Lauren talked me down from a full-scale koi pond ("If you want to see how truly powerless man is over nature, just try managing a hole with water in, bigshot," her eyes seemed to say), and we settled on a rain garden. I began digging at it in earnest a few weeks ago, and yesterday I finally set in the retaining wall and underlayment. The liner (imagine a flattened bicycle tube that's 10' x 20') will go down in the next few days, then I'll "rock it in" (landscaping term for adding the boulders I have been collecting all year, in the family tradition), and then plant it. The liner is just for a wide middle section, which I want to hold a shallow, temporary, meditative pool when the rains are heaviest. The grasses and creepers and mosses are welcome to this party.

There is zero chance I won't post a photo when I get the boulders, crush, and river stones set. After writing and drawing Achewood, building this rain garden is my happiest creative outlet. Crawling around on my hands and knees in the pit I have made, leveling out beds or carving footing for blocks, spikes my blood with the early creek freedom, and I am happily nowhere but right there in the dirt. I can do whatever I want with it. We've had some communication issues about it because Lauren, of course, wants to know what the hell this giant thing I am making in our yard is, and I won't really know until it's done, but I am sure I am going to love it, because I'm just letting it unfold without pretending I have total control over it.

All the same, I diplomatically made us a drawing of it, which you can see in the slideshow above.