Falling Uphill

Falling Uphill

For months now I have gone up and down the back hill without incident. I am always careful, but parts of the hill are steep and all of it is rocky. What makes it even tougher is that there are parts of the turf that seems to have no substance beneath it. I can’t tell if that is due to gofers or just dryness that has dried out and aerated the earth. I have had my foot sink up to ten inches in those parts and it has occurred to me that if I wasn’t careful I would end up with a twisted ankle. And of course, the biggest risk of all is the risk of moving a rock and finding that it was the home of some unfriendly rattlesnake.

The good news is that in the last four months of crawling all over that hillside, I haven’t seen one snake. For that matter, I haven’t seen any gofers either. The one bit of wildlife, other than lizards, has been the coyote that ran about ten feet from me one evening as it started its dusk feeding run. That was startling to say the least, but he had no interest in me, only in getting past me and over to the neighbors’ yard where the prior evening he had taken one of the neighbor’s three little dogs for his dinner. I have no way of being certain he was the culprit, but I think its fair to say he was the leading suspect.

The first stage of the back hillside project was the rock garden to the north. I moved those rocks on that dry and rock-strewn slope to form pockets of terraces randomly across the hillside. It was easier towards the bottom of the slope and harder at the headwall where it was steeper and rockier. Nonetheless, we were able to plant the entire hillside for about one hundred fifty feet. During all that process, I tended to go up and down in two places on the hillside where the natural stepping stones made the climb easier. I have probably gone uphill on the eastern side twice as often as on the western, so to say that I know the path is an understatement. Once the plants were in, it took a bit more attention to make the climb since it was silly to risk any of the new plantings. About half of the plantings were individual five gallon plants, but the other half was from flats of ice plants that we spread all across the hill to fill in. It was those plants that I was the most concerned about not stepping on.

Over the course of the summer, I hand-watered the entire hillside until the irrigation crew could install the two-zone irrigation system. The Western half got four pop-up heads on the lower part of the headwall since that area was mostly boulders and all the plantings were below. the Eastern half had the exact opposite with four pop-up heads on the top of the ridge to water downhill across the full expanse of plantings. It worked like a charm. In fact, it worked so well that the plantings flourished and especially the ice plants did what they do best, which is spread across the landscape. That was a fine outcome, but the one thing that it also did was reduce the places where one could make footfall without stepping on plants. Nevertheless, there was still a narrow path uphill on the eastern side that worked for climbing the hill.

Once I had the irrigation installed, I started planting the central ravine of the hillside. After we had laid down about thirty yards of cedar bark mulch and planted the fifty or so five and ten gallon cacti of every variety, I had to focus on daily watering to give these highly drought-tolerant plants the chance to root themselves before they went on their normal water diet. Therefore I dragged my heavy backyard hose down the hill and used it every day to water all the plants in the ravine. I have now refined my watering program and find that I can water all the plants whether from the central hose or from the big western hose from on top of the hillside. Therefore, there is no need for the hose to be down in the ravine and I knew that it would be put to better use up on the ridge to water the new rosemary plants put along the pathway as well as whatever parts of the eastern hillside that weren’t getting enough from the irrigation system. Did I mention that that is one heavy-ass hose on the western side?

Well, today was the day I decided it needed to be taken back up the hillside. I came to that conclusion after spending several hours sweating my keister off cutting the ornamental grasses around the Bison Boulder. I also did some weeding and watering and only then decided to tackle the hose. I grabbed the hose and started dragging it uphill. It was full of water and got heavier as I went uphill, but I managed. Then, as I got near the top, the fatigue of the morning and the weight of the hose I was dragging caught up with me and I missed a step while trying to avoid stepping on a growing clump of ice plants. When you’re my size and you start to go down, there’s no stopping things. I seemed to have enough time to know that I was falling and at least was falling into the hill. Falling down the hill would have been a disaster. Falling backward down the hill might have been fatal. At least I was falling uphill, which meant that I had less distance to fall and would land on my knees. that’s exactly what happened except that the upper part of that hill is not nice soft earth, it is filled with rough-edged rocks of all sizes.

All summer long I had been doing my gardening with shorts and crocs on my feet. For some reason, even though it was to be a warm day today, I wore my proper work boots with socks and my long Duluth Trading cargo pants made of Flexible Firehose material. This is a material that Duluth advertises won’t even get cut by a chain saw (something I always found hard to believe). One thing for sure, the cloth of these pants is as tough as any pair of pants I own. But that said, those rocks on that part of the hill are as sharp as any rocks I own. When I buy rocks I buy river rocks, but my hillside is covered with craggy and sharp rocks. Sure enough, I landed on my left knee with a thud and felt the pain in my kneecap and shin immediately. This was not the sort of pain of a broken bone, but it was unpleasant nonetheless.

Lying sprawled on the hillside with a heavy and water-filled hose around my neck is definitely not my best look, so I got up as quickly as I could and walked around to assess the damage. It hurt, but didn’t feel awful. I then found a friendly boulder to sit on to assess the damage more thoroughly. What I found was a two-inch rip in the knee of my indestructible Duluth Trading Firehose pants. I figure that once I tell Duluth my story I will certainly be sent a new pair if not even more for my testimonial on how they saved me from even worse injury. I pulled up the pant leg, which is made easy by virtue of the Duluth Firehose being flexible fabric. The scrape on my kneecap and the contusion on my shin bore witness to the fall, but looked like I would survive to garden another day. I pulled the heavy hose up the hill, not wanting to have wasted the effort and went in to find Kim’s shoulder to cry on.

Kim applied the peroxide, the alcohol and the disinfectant ointment and then bandaged me from top to bottom. As I write this story my only remaining question is whether I will even be able to move in the morning when I wake up and feel the full impact of my exercise of falling uphill.