Ditches, and Doom!

[rain_gryphon]

It's ditch diggin' time! To be honest, I'd never have guessed that there was a ditch here, although if you look on Google Maps, you can make out where it used to run, across the road to the east, along the hypotenuse of the little triangular wood, then south, bisecting the woods by "Little Shop in the Wood", and on toward the farms, dimly seen as a wet trace in the earth.

It's been plowed over repeatedly, it appears. That's probably a good part of the drainage issues we have here sometimes. If you back out on the resolution, you can see the green ditches running cross-country, that were left alone. This spring, there was a flock of county engineers (at least 12) riding about in a pair of vans, poking at everyone's drainage features. I didn't speak to them at the time (I had an appointment, and was late), but it did motivate me to make sure later that my south culvert was unblocked and flowing freely. They ended up putting in an extra culvert on the US Metals property north of here. With any luck at all, I'll benefit without having to pay any of the assessment :)

Sucks to be the Little Shop in the Wood people. They were trying to unload that property anyway. They spent the money to build an antique store there, which turned out to be too far out to attract any business. They rebuilt it as a home, and just put up a garage too. Now they're improving the ditch before they sell.

*****

Rural gothic. Although, if she didn't stay to watch him die, I'm not sure how they can charge her with failure to report human remains. Certainly you can charge her with being a scumbag.

*****

And now,it's Debate Time!

Comments

[nodrog]

Don't you just love po' buckra basuras blanca?  When I first came to South Carolina too many years ago, a newspaper graphic showed the instances per thousand of spina bifida, the congenital birth defect, per county, color-coded.  It was a spectrum, running from the coast up into the Appalachians.  The article said the cause of this steady parallel climb was “undetermined.”  ie, it made no mention of “going to family reunions to meet girls.”  Meanwhile, the very same paper carried the story of a screaming child found hanging out the window of a burning house, at the end of a logging chain by which he'd been secured whenever his parents were out.  Yeah.

[rain_gryphon]

I ought, probably, to feel sympathy for them more than feeling contempt. It's very hard, though.

Google Maps

[nodrog]

It's not Minnesota, but that land between Akron and Rochester looks flat as a table - flat as Western Russia, tho' you'd have to take my word on that…

Pleasant countryside, though.

Re: Google Maps

[rain_gryphon]

Yeah, there're slight height differences of five feet or so, but anything above that is either man made or a glacial outwash kame.

Re: Google Maps

[nodrog]

I once worked with a girl straight out of A Prairie Home Companion - her name was Soderquist, and she showed me an aerial photo of her home town in Minnesota.  It was a cluster of buildings with the church tallest, at the intersection of two laser-straight roads at 90° angle.  If you laid two ribbons across a ping-pong table and put a collection of matchboxes and pillboxes and dice &c. there, you'd have it.  Astounding.

Re: Google Maps

[rain_gryphon]

Yeah, the difference in platting and layouts between here and southern Indiana (where I grew up) is amazing. In southern Indiana, the roads, and often the property lines, follow the contours of the land. Up here, it's all laid out as a grid, with almost every road intersection a four-way.