the Walnut Diary

The fill around our expensive septic tank seemed to be receding, and it had left what looked like a truck tire track along the uphill edge of it.  This did not look good for winter frost, so today I resolved to repair the damage.  I called Don Day, the installer, to ask him where I could find some topsoil which wasn’t frozen.  He offered a load today at about 1:00 from a basement he was digging in Seeley’s Bay.  I hitched Ruby to my newly acquired 1996 4X8 trailer and turned up on time for a half-yard bucket of beautiful, dry, clear, black topsoil.  A house is going on the site.

Our septic tank sits on a side hill, down below the basement of the stone house and above an old orchard.  The problem is getting a heavy vehicle up the hill or down from above without crushing the drain from the house to the tank.

On the twenty-minute drive home I thought about possible approaches to the septic tank, and eventually decided to try to deliver the trailer with Ruby because it would save scarce time, avoid re-hitching, and the last time I messed with this particular slope and a trailer, I’d rolled my lightweight Bolens tractor down it.

A narrow relic of a driveway makes its way around the house in classic Georgian style.  Below it is quite a steep slope which has challenged all vehicles, including the lamented Bolens.  The trick was to drive up the slope onto the narrow driveway, avoid an encroaching dogwood, gain the lip of the road with the trailer, and then, before the driveway ended in another landscaped slope, stop and prepare to back the trailer fifty feet to the septic tank in need of the fill.  The final approach ran around a corner with the dogwood on one side and a walnut on the other,  warning me not to venture too far over the edge onto the slope.

Ruby’s low range and differential lock work beautifully when one really needs them.  By my standards this was a difficult trailer-positioning job, and the Cayenne did its part with ease, even when one wheel and then another were forced to venture over the brink onto the slope below.  The differential lock simply engaged and the car continued backing the recalcitrant trailer up to the mark.

I shovelled vigorously and the dry topsoil had little frost in it, so the job was completed in the extremely restricted time frame allowed (snowstorm tonight).

Ruby did well.  I should have taken photos, but I was too busy.  Sorry.