Two Days Outside

I didn't write much last week for a bunch of reasons, including fatigure from a very busy weekend and spending all of Wednesday and Thursday out in the field. This was a continuation of the monitoring gig I wrote about several times last year, along the George Washington Memorial Parkway in northern Virginia.

The road is being rebuilt, and as part of this project they are repairing a bunch of outfalls (places where pipes that carry water under the road empty out). You can see from this picture that some of the outfalls are in bad shape. The GW Parkway parallels the Potomac River and a good portion of it lies within archaeological sites. So the National Park Service, which owns the Parkway, has required that work on the outfalls within archaeological sites be monitored by an archaeologist. Including this one.

The subcontractor responsible for rebuilding the outfalls is a Spanish-speaking outfit called RBA. Speaking no Spanish, I sometimes have trouble communicating with their crews; usually at least one has passable English, but not always. One interesting incident happened Tuesday when four guys were carrying an erosion control snake into position. (Photo from last year to show what this looks like.) The snakes are full of mulch, so they are heavy, and these guys were carrying one about 30 feet long down a pretty steep slope when one guy's belt came undone and his pants fell down. He stopped, which led to a sort of chain reaction along the line, everyone being brought up short and one guy falling down. Then somebody said something that must have been hilarious, because they all started laughing uproariously while they tried to get their train started again, stumbling, bumping into each other, laughing so hard they sometimes doubled over as they worked their way down the slope. Quite the scene.

The foreman of this crew was a guy I think of as the Stump Hater. He hates stumps and spends what seems to me like crazy amounts of time removing all stumps from anywhere he is working. The only time during this project I ever rushed out into the work zone was to stop this guy from digging out a stump in an artifact-rich area where he had no business digging. So of course while he was cutting a sort of ramp across the face of the steep slope above the outfall he spent most of the time digging out four stumps. Watching this I kept thinking that I would have done this ramp differently and used the largest stump to buttress the downhill side of the ramp, but no. Since this was all up on the fill prism for the roadway, built in the 1950s, it was none of my business, so I just watched as he methodically wreaked his vengeance on all nearby stumps.

I spent my breaks exploring. This site was about 50 yards from a stream called Pimmit Run, which looks like this.

Just downstream from my outfall were the remains of a late 19th-century estate that was torn down when the parkway was built, including terracing, specimen trees, and a strange little fishpond.

I was fascinated by the patterning of the dead reeds along the creek, but it would take a much better photographer than I to capture the effect.

On my birthday I found snowdrops blooming; one of the great things about a late February birthday is that nature often celebrates the day with early signs of spring.

A red-shouldered hawk gave me a severe screeching when I walked too close, but it was in no mood to be photographed so all I got was this surrealist blob.

All in all it was two pretty good days.