Day Six

October 7, 2023

sister cistern

cisterns and level

that’s jeanette. she’s packing dirt into a column that’s cut into the cistern. if you were inside the cistern, you could call it a stalactite. there are 2 such stalactites in each cistern. you fill them with dirt for support. without that support, if you filled the cistern with water it would collapse on itself. i can’t imagine what that might look like, but it certainly isn’t a good thing.

it was a much smaller group of people working today. saturday is optional for the students, but it’s a half day for the crew. there were two major things happening - placing and connecting the cisterns, and adjusting and leveling the top course of tires.

the cisterns were already in place when i got there this morning (the crew also starts earlier than we do) but i think the cisterns got carried up there, i don’t believe they’re that heavy. they got ganged together and the 3 of them will feed into the house via one pipe.

leveling the top course is a lot harder than you may think at first. it needs to be level to itself, of course, then level to the ones next to hit, then placed the proper distance back as compared to the course below it (the whole tire wall steps back 1.5 inches with every course, starting with the first one above grade). and you have to have the right kind of tire as well when leveling. because some brands of tire don’t hold a shape as well, and some are too rigid to adjust much. it winds up being closer to an art form than a set process. and it can be really, really frustrating.

another day of good talks on the wall. at one point 4 of us got into a really good conversation, with everybody engaged, everybody involved. i don’t even remember the subject matter - wait, i do remember. the subject matter was conspiracy theories. ha! i won’t even start down that rabbit hole in this writing, but it kinda went along like you might expect. not fully, but kinda. be that as it may, what is primary in my memory of that talk was just how present it was. all 4 people fully present, not arguing, but not simply agreeing either. reading what i just wrote makes it sound like it was some ‘magical’ moment. it wasn’t magical. but it was good.

slideshow from walking around the structure.