The Great Wall

October 23rd, 2006

In addition to pursuing the usual outdoor adventures this summer, I decided in June that I would like to re-landscape the hill in front of our house. The previous owners (bless their hearts) had taken out all the trees on the hill and replaced them with a hodgepodge of juniper bushes. The bushes would have been nice, except they were too far apart to adequately cover the ground, causing the landscape fabric to deteriorate and weeds and grass to invade. When we bought the house nearly two years ago, the hill had grown quite out of hand. This spring, I decided to get started on renovation.

In the five intervening months I've pulled out an estimated sixty juniper bushes (each at least ten feet across), run about twenty pickup loads to the dump, and successfully used up a good share of my weekend hours hacking away at the prickly branches and rope-like roots of these amazing plants. My method for removal evolved from a rudimentary phase (hacking each branch off individually, then digging out the root system) to slightly more advanced techniques (digging under the root and using a lever to remove the entire bush). Still, each bush took about thirty minutes to an hour, depending on size. At one point I finally caved in and rented an excavator, which compressed about two months of manual labor into two hours.

After I had stipped the entire hillside of vegetation, I began planning my wall. I've always loved walls: when I was a boy, I become something of an expert at building walls in our enormous childhood sandbox. I perfected the techique of mounding the eight-inch wall by hand, packing it down, then trimming the sides and top with a shovel to create perfectly rectangular spans. Since buying our house I'd fantasized about building a retaining wall in the hill create more of a level surface on which to plant. However, the length of our hillside (two hundred linear feet) meant that a significant wall would require about $10,000 just in materials, not to mention the labor of hand-placing each 60 pound block.

My current scaled-down plan is to buy $2,000 in blocks and build a two-foot wall along the bottom of the hill. This will give me something of a surface on which to plant groundcover and will provide definition between the edge of the property and the road and driveway. How exactly I am going to get fourteen pallets of block (each pallet weighing 3,200 pounds) placed before snow flies is something my wife does not tire of questioning!

Saturday I rented a backhoe and dug the trench for my wall. I didn't get quite deep enough, so I've been going over it with a shovel and rototiller to loosen and remove the soil. I'm about half finished with the trench, after which I need to place and compact a layer of gravel then begin placing my first course of blocks.

Doing this relatively simple project has heightened my sense of wonder at the gigantic public works that we humans are capable of. Imagine attempting a feat like the construction of the Great Wall in China.... nearly four thousand miles of stone and rammed earth, all in a futile attempt to contain your external enemies. Some estimate that a million people died in the construction of the various walls now known as the Great Wall. I may not be willing to lay my life down for my two foot block wall, but I can relate to the physical experience of trying to manipulate nature's materials on a massive scale.

And this isn't even the end of the project... I still need to plant the shade trees, bushes and groundcover on the rest of the hill this coming spring!