The Job That Never Ends

Lisa has created some mottoes for Vent Haven Museum, little sarcastic mottoes that she can say when she's frustrated by some aspect of the job. One of those mottoes is "Vent Haven--No Job Gets Done Once." Some jobs SEEM like they ought to be a do it once kind of job, but they just keep coming back again and again.


The one I'm specifically talking about today first began in October of 2004. That's when, after the Vent Haven Museum 2004 season had ended, we tore down the well that was in the yard between Buildings One and Two. The well was falling apart and needed to be torn down. We knew that, but what we didn't know was what would await us when the well was knocked down. We worried a little about that. We even tried sticking our video camera with night vision into one of the holes in the well so that we could see down into the well to see how deep it was or to see if there was any water in it, but it was so dark that the camera didn't pick up anything but blackness (Actually, greenness, since that's what color everything looks with the night vision on). Our biggest fear, I guess, was that there would be a foot of water in the bottom of the well or something like that.



Well, there wasn't a foot of water, but there WAS a big problem. Let me repeat that--a BIG problem. The problem was that the well was bigger--err, deeper, I mean--than we were expecting. I'm really no good with measuring things, so I couldn't even begin to guess how deep the hole was. The photo to the right should give you an idea, though. It's a photo standing over the hole looking down into it. We took that photo just after the well was knocked down to try to give others some idea of the size of the hole. Here's the thing to key in on. At what I would call twelve o'clock you can see a gray object with lines running horizontally across it. That's a 30 gallon trash can! It was at least 20 feet down to the bottom of the well, if not further. The contractor who knocked down the well filled in the hole, but from what I could tell they made no effort to fill in the sides of the hole as the well sort of bulged out underneath the opening on all sides, so that the opening only shows about 40% of the total size of the well. The contractor didn't push the fill dirt into that area--they just dumped fill dirt until the hole was filled and called it a day.

Since they hadn't pushed the fill dirt to expand out into the other 60% of the well, I knew there was going to be trouble. Lisa initially said, "Let's plant grass where the well was."

I told her, "Uh, that might not be such a good idea. That thing's going to keep sinking."

"Oh yeah?" she asked. "For how long do you think?"

"Forever," I said. So instead of planting grass, we tried to make the well look like a flower bed. You can see what the well looks like now by looking at this photo from the Vent Haven ConVENTion website. The Flower-Bed-Formerly-Known-As-Well can be seen in the lower left hand photo. It's the area in front of the building with the pink flowers in it.

I'm not sure it's going to sink forever anymore, but I can say that it's still sinking. During the winter of 04-05, as I expected, the well sank quite a bit more, maybe six feet. That spring we ordered a load of rocks and threw them into the well. Before we tossed them in I got down into the well and pushed a whole bunch of the dirt further down and into the sides, hoping to stave off another big drop that upcoming winter. It didn't help. The winter of 05-06 the well sank again, not quite as far, but still several feet. Again in the spring I jumped into the well (every time I do that I have this mostly unfounded fear that the whole thing is going to collapse and I'm going to fall twenty feet into the well) and pushed the dirt and rocks down into the sides of the well. I then threw into the well just about anything I could find, including an entire set of encyclopedias and a number of other books.

Don't look at me that way--they're biodegradable!

Anyway, I'm telling you this whole story because this morning I got back down into the well and pushed the dirt around some more. The encyclopedias, by the way, have pretty much disintegrated, but the rocks were still there, and I had to push them around again. The bad news is that once I had finished the well was about four feet deep again. The good news is that I really feel that I filled in the outer edges of the well really well this time. I don't think it will sink as much next year. Maybe in a year or two we WILL be able to plant grass there.