Not to be Confused

My address is 3470 LaLonde Road, not to be confused with LaLonde Street, which is on the other side of town.  Lalonde Road branches east off of Butler Road, which runs north and south along the eastern city limits.  Lalonde Road dead ends in a junk yard, and our driveway is the last one before that on the south side of the road.  We are about a quarter mile east of the city limits.

An impoundment is a pond that that is held back by a dam or embankment.  In the case of the Little Black River, it's an earthen embankment with a culvert at the bottom that allows a limited flow of water out of the impoundment, which keeps the spring runoff from running off too fast and flooding the west side of town like it used to do.  If you saw a concrete dam with a spillway on top, you were probably looking at the Black River Dam, not the Little Black River impoundment.  As the name implies, the Little Black River is a much smaller stream than the Black River, and it is located on the western edge of the City of Cheboygan.  I believe that LaLonde Street is nearby, not to be confused with LaLonde Road like I said.

A septic system is what rural people have instead of sewers.  All the water discharged from our house, including the toilets, drains into a thousand gallon septic tank, usually made out of concrete.  Over time, most of the solids, like shit and toilet paper, decompose into a liquid state.  This is why we don't use 2 ply toilet paper, because it takes longer to liquify and would require that the tank be pumped out more frequently than the usual three to five years.  If you neglect to have your tank pumped out when it needs it, the solids will accumulate to the point that they will plug up the works and your toilet won't flush properly.  In extreme cases, the solids might infiltrate the drain field and plug it up to the point that it ceases to drain.

Okay, the drain field is a network of pipes that disperses the waste water from an overflow pipe in the septic tank into the ground, from whence it percolates harmlessly down into the water table.  Since our water table is so close to the surface, we were required to install a raised drain field with three feet of sand fill between the pipes and the natural surface of the ground.  Modern wells do not draw their water from the water table, also called the surface vein.  They go down much deeper than that, usually between 100 and 200 feet in our neighborhood, to a vein of water bearing gravel.

We have lots of birds around here, except during December, January, February, and March, when chickadees are about all we see.  Some species are migrants, just passing through, and others nest here.  We don't see the big flocks of migrants that they get in some other parts of the country, but we often hear and/or see geese or cranes, maybe a dozen or two at a time.  My marsh project was started with the intention of attracting ducks and geese, and we do see some out there this time of year, but not after it dries up for the summer.  I need to dig it deeper and wider for it to retain water all year, but I don't think I'm going to live long enough to do that.  That white stretch in the background is indeed snow, but it's not sitting on higher ground, just on  vegetation, mostly sticks and logs this time of year.  The whole marsh looked like that before I started working on it.

Cheboygan County reported it's first COVID-19 death today, and Emmet County reported its second.  Only about 80 of the more than 10,000 Michigan cases have been in the northern 2/3 of the state so far.