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bluestone boulder gap
Thursday, July 16 2009
Building the greenhouse has partly been an experiment in the feasibility of constructing a building that could maintain its own moderate climate without energy inputs. For the most part this has been realized; once the building was enclosed (in late December 2008), its floor-level temperature fell below freezing only once, and that was on a day when outdoor temperatures were -10 Fahrenheit and the foundation still only partially-insulated.
One of the reasons for such a self-climate-moderating building was to allow me to implement a composting toilet in an unheated outbuilding. The plan was to build the toilet room into the still-unrealized greenhouse attic area and then have the composting unit in the greenhouse itself, possibly providing air for its ærobic needs from the perimeter drain pipe. (I even implemented an extra T in the perimeter drain just to provide additional access to it through the north wall.)
It might seem strange to most readers that I would have such an interest in composting my own fecal output, but such people need to know something about my world view. I think of myself as something of a weather system, a hurricane, swirling over the land. I suck hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, iron, zinc, etc. from my environment and then when I've junked it up and can no longer use it, I blow it out. There the plants, insects, and sun can turn it back into a form I can use and the cycle can repeat. This isn't just true of me; it's also true of the building and objects around me. When possible, I burn waste paper for heat and bury drywall scraps in the yard, a bounty of calcium and sulfate ions especially good for brassicas like collard greens. The idea of using electricity to pump perfectly good water out of the ground, mix it with my wastes, only to make it vanish uselessly into a septic field runs counter to the idealized nutrient cycles in my mind. I want my feces to turn into something I can shovel into a garden to make its soil richer and make my local food sources more bountiful. I've already achieved this with my urine output, much of which now ends up mixed with leaves and buried in the garden, and that's just a side effect of the convenient siting of two flushless urinals. (At our house, I have stood in front a flush toilet to piss precisely once in over two years, and that was because I'd momentarily forgotten about my urinal system.)
For the past few days, though, I've been thinking that the greenhouse is a poor place to locate the fecal composter I'm envisioning. It will take up too much space better dedicated to growing plants, and it would be more convenient to have the composted turds end up in a place where I could just roll up a wheelbarrow.
So today I thought about maybe locating the composting toilet as a stand-alone building in the nearby woods to the southeast of the house (near the start of the Stick Trail). Surveying this area for a location, I examined a huge bluestone boulder laying on its side (its layers nearly perpendicular to the ground). The boulder was the size of a small car and half-buried in the rubble and soil of the terrace along which the Stick Trail runs. About six inches of the top layers of the boulder had broken off sometime soon after it had been deposited (almost certainly during the last ice age, perhaps 15,000 years ago). This detached top layer had split off and settled somewhat separately into the soil, leaving a bit of a gap between itself and the mother boulder from which it had calved. Looking at this, I pictured an outhouse perched atop the boulder with a composter in the area between the calved layers and the larger boulder. There wasn't anywhere near enough space as the rocks lay now, but if I used my farm jack (with its four foot throw), I could force the calved layers up to vertical and open up a suitable space.
It was, I soon realized, lunacy to actually perch an outhouse on this boulder. To do so would have also been an affront to nature, particularly if I were to go through the bother of insulating the outside of these rocks so they could serve as some sort of freakish solar-heated thermal mass for my fecal composter. These rocks were beautiful and moss-covered, and they should always stay visible to the world. This did not mean, however, that I shouldn't try to jack them apart. So I got the farm jack and started jacking.
It bears mentioning that my farm jack is rated to lift 7000 pounds but can probably easily lift a whole lot more. It also bears mentioning that I was jacking the rocks apart at the part of the gap between them furthest from the ground, a place where the calved rock would have the most leverage for forcing away the soil holding it against its parent. Despite all that, I could barely move the calf with the jack. I pulled on its long four foot handle with all my strength, a force multiplied a couple dozen times by the ratcheting system of the jack. This force was in turn multiplied several times by the leverage of the calved rock against the soil. I'm guessing the force applied to that soil was on the order of ten tons. Gradually the space between the calve and its parent opened up, and as it did so the wedge rocks I'd piled into the gap slid down and solidified my gains. As I worked the calved rock further and further from its mother, a chasm opened up that extended several feet into the ground, giving an idea of the amount of the boulder beneath the ground.
Jacking apart this boulder was a bit more exciting than I can possibly relate, probably because I was actually able to move things with such enormous mass using nothing but a system of levers. But as I worked, I was understandably worried about the huge forces in play beside me, though the only discomfort came in the form of mosquitoes. Sometimes I find myself missing the environment of my childhood in rural Virginia south of Staunton, where, despite the presence of a huge marshland, there were almost no mosquitoes.
The partially jacked-apart calve and mother bluestone boulder.
Several ratchets later on the jack. For scale, the throw of that jack is four feet. Note the rocks I've wedged into the gap to solidify the gains made as I jack apart the layers.
The greenhouse as viewed from just west of the household septic field.
The angle (from the south) I've consistently used to document changes in the greenhouse site.
Plants and such just west of the greenhouse. I'd transplanted this huge Jewelweed from the Esopus floodplain and it has unexpectedly thrived here on a pile of fill.
The path to the greenhouse from the house.
Greenhouse doorwell.
Greenhouse viewed from the east.
Viewed from the northeast.
The north wall, mostly buried in fill (with plants I'd transplanted growing on it).
The north wall from a distance.
Inside the greenhouse. Here you can see the small shelf I built for the DECT 6.0 phone.
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