Pile Driver

Well, I got it wrong.  Carol’s mom remained frozen not because the cremation place was shut down by the fires, but because, the very day its scheduled yearly maintenance the cremation thing broke down.  How ironic?  Or perhaps merely coincidental?  So they had not only to do maintenance, they had actually to fix it.  Unless there’s more to a cremation apparatus than I think I have to wonder what the hell could have broken.  Isn’t it like a fiery oven?  There’s not much to that.  Maybe the pilot light went out.

I lie down to take a nap but can’t because of this banging sound.  It’s coming from a ways off but still pretty damn loud because it starts and stops.  The sound is coming from a pile driver I can see out the condo window.  It’s less than a mile away but I can’t figure out where exactly it’s located so I can’t figure out what the hell it is doing or why it’s there banging away.

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So yesterday, when we were taking a plant to Carol’s office, we turned off on a road we thought might take us next to the pile driver.  It didn’t but we did get a closer view.  It was banging away at the very edge of the gold course where a concrete wall was constructed with an opening through which water could flow to keep the golf course from being flooded.  When it  rains a lot—and it has been a bit since it has done that—the golf course gets flooded like a shallow lake and has on one occasion, when we had the El Nino, come awful close to our back fence.

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Away it looks as if they are doing something to the drainage ditch from the golf course that runs off into a slough that is a bird refuge.  At one end of the slough is the golf course and at the other a small inlet that allows ocean water to lap into the slough at high tides.  And usually there are birds hanging out there.  In fact, Santa Barbara has a considerable diversity of birds because there are both sea birds and land birds.  Sometime birdwatchers from foreign countries come to SB to look at the birds.  Once, when I could still bike, I crossed a little bridge lined on both sides by Germans with binoculars.

 

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Right where we were standing to look at the pile driver was a sign that said the slough was a bird refuge and that the slough was in danger because of contaminated run off and that steps were being taken to save the slough.  The sign also said that before 1960 the slough had gone clear into where the golf course is now.  So if our condo had been standing in 1960, it would have been standing in the slough or right at the edge of it, by my calculations.

 

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