by Laura Crum
As
some of you know, I’ve been working pretty hard lately on a new project that
isn’t horse or writing related, and today I’m going to tell the story, as a
couple of you (I’m looking at you, Funder) have requested it. For the rest of
you, this may be a pretty boring post.
Long
ago, when I was twenty-two, I spent a summer living by myself at a fairly
remote Sierra lake, with only my young dog for company. That summer left a deep
mark on me, and ever since then, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with sitting
by/contemplating water. The first three houses I lived in after I graduated
from college were all situated by the banks of creeks. But the property where I
now live, which I call home, does not have any water within view. And it has
always bugged me.
About
sixteen years ago, as I was going through a divorce and struggling with
depression, I became determined to have SOME water to look at from my porch. So
I dug a hole and bought a pond liner and some rocks, and voila I had a little
fish pond. About seven feet long, four feet wide and four feet deep in the
deepest part. I had water lilies and iris and goldfish, and for all these many
years I have very much enjoyed my pond. But it wasn’t enough.
Every
year, as we took our annual road trip across the country to visit my in-laws in
Michigan, we camped by and swam in natural bodies of water. Lakes, rivers,
streams, reservoirs, canals. My husband’s parents live on a small lake and
while we stay there, we swim every day.
Grandma
and Grandpa’s lake.
Lake
Michigan—our favorite time to swim there is sunset.
Poudre
River in Colorado—we camped there every summer for seven years in a row.
The
mighty Mississippi River—there is a house on an island that I am looking at in the
photo.
Walker
River in Nevada—my husband swam in every body of water we found.
Stanislaus
River in the Sierras—very near the lake where I spent my long ago solitary
summer.
And
every year, when we came home from the summer trip, I longed to have a natural
body of water to sit by and get into. I had/have no interest in chlorinated
traditional swimming pools or hot tubs, with their sterile, stinky water (no offense to those who like/own such things--we all have different taste). I
wanted “real” living water—a waterhole in a creek would do. But though I
searched all around our county, I never found anything suitable. Sure, there is
Monterey Bay a couple of miles away, and we do go there, but I wanted water
that was private, where I could be alone (I know, I’m a misanthrope), and I
didn’t want to have to drive somewhere. I wanted to LIVE by water. Water I
could contemplate and get into. But no matter how hard I thought and dreamed
and schemed, I could not come up with a concept that seemed to work. For years…
My
husband and I talked of damming the seasonal creek that runs through our
pasture in the Sierra foothills, but we never could figure out a plan to do
this that seemed likely to succeed in creating the water hole we wanted. And in
the end, we didn’t want to spend time and money building something that might
not work out. Not to mention we got up to the pasture once a month at best, and
sometimes it was once a year. The pasture is three hours away from our home,
and we were getting burned out on the drive. So that idea eventually got
discarded.
I
schemed and planned about various possible water features we could build here
at home, but I couldn’t really figure out where such a thing should be or what
it should look like. And then, one day, about a year ago, a whole lot of things
came together in a moment of inspiration (these moments are SO MUCH fun). And
finally I had a concept.
Here
I have to backtrack a moment and add that another aspect to this situation was
our desire to have an emergency supply of fresh water here at home. I had been
through the Loma Prieta earthquake, and, at the time, I was taking care of my
uncle’s small ranch (with twenty horses in residence) while he was out of town
on vacation. Since he was on a well, and the power (which ran the pump) was out
for two weeks, it was incredibly helpful for me that he had a large water tank
at the top of the property with the appropriate infrastructure to run it on
gravity feed through the water lines when needed. Thus I was able to water the
horses until the power came back on. It also wasn’t lost on me that even if the
tank had not been there, Soquel Creek bordered the property on one side, and I
could have led the horses there to drink once a day. It would have been a pain,
but it would have worked. So it has always bugged me not to have some
sort of emergency water supply here.
Anyway,
at my moment of inspiration, one of the factors in play was that my husband
wanted to build a small greenhouse, and we had chosen the site. But the logical
place for a water tank that could supply our property through gravity feed was
above the greenhouse site, and the only way to install such a tank was to put
it there before we began the greenhouse project. And so we were stalling on
starting the greenhouse because neither of us could decide if we really wanted
to spend the money on a water tank, and we couldn’t figure out how to
effectively combine it with the existing water system. We were sort of stuck.
And
then it came to me. I could kill three (not two, THREE) birds with one stone.
And suddenly I knew exactly how to do it.
The
inspiration began (get this) thanks to facebook. My friend Liann Finnerty, who
is an old high school friend as well as a facebook friend, posted a photo of a
natural swimming pool and a link to the site where she found it. Liann is an
artist and when she mentioned that these were the swimming pools of her dreams,
I took a look. And finally, finally, I got an image of the thing I wanted to
make. Because two of the pools on the site (the second and third) really
inspired me.
Waterhouse Pools. This, I thought, just this, is what I want to
do.
But
I still didn’t know where to put the thing. I walked out my backdoor, looking
for an answer, and it came to me. Just outside my back door was
something we referred to (rather optimistically) as “the courtyard.” The
courtyard is the level area between our two small houses. It is covered in pea
gravel and there are roses planted on the fences and buildings that surround
it. We think it looks very pleasant and French (in a rustic haphazard American
way).
That
is, it looks pleasant when it is empty. But it was almost never empty. Because
it was one of the only flat places where we could park the camper and the big
pickup that hauls the camper, and we used it more as part of the driveway. So
my courtyard was occupied by a large, ugly white camper and a big truck. This
absolutely ruined whatever beauty it had, and it bugged me every single day. It
had been this way for years.
The
thing is, on the day I looked out at the courtyard searching for a place to put
my pool, I was aware that we hadn’t actually USED the camper in over a year. We
had used it pretty much non-stop for ten years, and we took a lot of road trips
and camping trips in that time. But all three of us had gotten pretty burned
out on covering highway miles and we just weren’t motivated to plan camper
trips these days. For the past year and a half I had been walking
around/looking at the camper/truck combo in the courtyard—to no real purpose.
And I suddenly realized that if I could walk around that footprint every day of
my life, I could walk around another equal footprint—the footprint of the pool.
Not only would I gain a pool, but the annoying camper would be gone. AND I
would have fresh water storage that was beautiful, instead of a big ugly water
tank. At that moment I knew what I wanted to do, and somewhere in my heart I
knew I would accomplish this.
The
very first thing I did (after I broke it to my husband what I planned to do) was
put the camper in storage. Then I began parking the big pickup truck in the
riding ring (a temporary measure). Now the courtyard was empty. I got some
garden hose and laid it out in the footprint where the camper/truck had been. I
fiddled with it until I had a rough shape for my pool. And then I spent a LOT
of time looking at it and thinking about it.
This
was last summer. I contemplated my potential pool and I walked around its shape
every time I crossed the courtyard. I also called Chris from the Waterhouse
Pools site and asked for advice. Chris lives in New England and it wasn’t
practical to have him build me a pool out here in California. He recommended a
book by Michael Littlewood about natural swimming pools,
which he said got him started building these pools. He told me that if I
couldn’t find a natural pool builder in my area, I should look for an
experienced koi pond/landscape pond builder. “It’s basically the same thing,”
he said.
I
bought the book. My husband and I read it cover to cover. We learned a lot. And
I began looking for natural pool builders in my area. Turns out there were no
natural pool builders in my county/part of the world. Or none that I could
find. The closest folks who billed themselves this way were three hours away.
And they all turned out to build something very different from what I wanted.
Essentially they built regular chlorinated, concrete swimming pools that were
designed to “look” natural. This wasn’t what I had in mind. I wanted a pond
that was meant for people to get in it, more or less. All the filtering and
purifying of the water was to be done by plants and beneficial bacteria, as it
is done in a balanced garden pond—or, for that matter, in any natural body of
clear water.
So
I looked for a pond builder. I called quite a few. And only one was responsive
and interested. And this was Tim from
Pond Magic.
Tim
had never built a “natural swimming pool.” But he had built over three hundred
ponds. He listened to my idea, looked at the photos on the Waterhouse website,
and said that he liked the concept and didn’t see why he and his crew couldn’t
build such a thing. I looked at his website and saw that he had done the sort
of work building dry stone walls and placing large boulders that I was
interested in doing. He borrowed our books on natural swimming pools to learn
more. He reiterated that he made no claim to being a natural pool builder. I
said that I would design the pool and take responsibility for it. He would just
be building another pond—to my specifications. I wanted to be in charge of my
own project and supervise it every step of the way. Unlike many contractors,
Tim didn’t seem to have a problem with this. We agreed that we would work “time
and materials” (in my view the only fair and workable way to do ANY
construction project). And we set a date to build the project in the spring—six
months away.
During
the six months before my planned construction date I pondered my “pool” every
single day. I knew that I wanted to build it using a flexible pond liner (which
was the sort of construction Tim the pond builder was most familiar with) and I
wanted to line it entirely—walls, floor and rim—with natural stone. The
Waterhouse Pools site had given me a visual image of a “sunken patio floor”
that I wanted to do, and also a concept for a small pool that was lined by big
slabs of flat rock, like something you might find in a quarry. One of my
concerns was to fit this pool into our landscape in both practical and
aesthetically pleasing ways. And one of the things I wanted to avoid was the
“faux” natural look that I saw in most garden ponds. You know, here’s your
suburban lawn and next to it is this irregular rocky little “natural” pond.
Uhmm, huge clash there. My pool was to be set in a simple open, graveled site
and there was no way in hell it made any kind of aesthetic sense for it to look
like some kind of mini natural lake. What I thought it should look like was
sort of as if people had developed a spring and made a reservoir. Or perhaps as
if there had once been a quarry—I had seen many interesting pools in quarry
sites.
So
this was the vision I kept in my head as I planned the pool. Something simple
and clearly man-made, but very much about natural stone. As if some primitive
village had developed a spring and built a reservoir… a compromise between
“formal” and “natural” styles. And gradually I began to see the pool clearly in
my mind.
There
were practical considerations also. The pool needed to fit into the footprint
we had been walking around for years (where the camper/truck were parked). It
could not impede the paths that we used every day. It would be essentially at
the end of our driveway, so there needed to be some large boulders at the
driveway end of the pool to prevent some idiot from driving into the water
(“What, who me?” said my husband when I mentioned this). We had to come up with
an effective way to hide the skimmer/pump. And we needed to decide between the
various methods of filtering/pumping. We also had to figure out a design that
allowed for a “wetland system” where the plants would be, and an area for
people to go in the water. I wanted to have a “deep” waterhole, where I could float. And we had to choose
what sort of stone we wanted to use. There was a lot to think about.
OK—this
is too long and probably very boring to most people. Certainly not horse or
writing related. I will finish the “pool saga” up next post—with lots of photos
of the pool itself.
