This Sunday I will be returning to my land to admire any progress that was made. There should be a concrete strip road across the stream crossing. The filling in between and beside the concrete strip road down the access slope probably won’t have been done, as Billy is unwilling to do it unless the Cousin from Pakse, who lost money we entrusted him with, took off with my chainsaw, and contracted malaria for his sins, returns to help him. Last time I was at my land the Cousin from Pakse was too busy planting rice, but I’m sure he’ll turn up this time, as he’s asked to borrow money.

Crapper design utilizing smaller earthbags. Notice the batch solar water heater.

I have great expectations for this trip, and it will be interesting to see just how thoroughly fate dashes them, as usual. The good news is that I’ve almost run out of money, so I can be faithful to my pledge of using only sustainable building practices and utilizing the simplest of locally available materials. Since a moderate period of poverty is on the horizon, it’s essential to have a crapper and bath to go along with my humble abode, so that I can stay there and frugally subsist, if nothing else. The crapper/bath design has both evolved and devolved over time. The design is no longer bomb-proof, though it could still sustain hits from three sides if the US ever decides to resume their illegal bombing in the area. I managed to get my hands on smaller, 40cm X 70cm, polypropylene bags. These will be sufficient since it will be a small, relatively low-walled building. Without the roof, it will look something like what you can see to the left.

This is an example of a composting toilet.

The most exciting aspect of this design is the composting toilet. No real composting occurs in the toilet, it merely houses a temporary turd receptacle. There is no greater nightmare for a woman than a composting toilet. A turd of any size should be thoroughly washed away to any location as far away as possible, if not oblivion, with copious amounts of potable water and “dealt with.” I will compost this “humanure,” but I haven’t decided what to do with it after it’s becomes, for all practical purposes, entirely safe. Perhaps I’ll pass it through the guts of composting worms, just to be on the overly safe side. Which brings me to an interesting quote from Joseph Jenkins’ The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure.

A young English couple was visiting with me one summer after I had been composting humanure for about six years. One evening, as dinner was being prepared, the couple suddenly understood the horrible reality of their situation: the food they were about to eat was recycled human shit. When this fact abruptly dawned upon them, it seemed to set off an instinctive alarm, possibly inherited directly from Queen Victoria. “We don’t want to eat shit!” they informed me, rather distressed (that’s an exact quote), as if in preparing dinner I had simply set a steaming turd on a plate in front of them with a knife, fork and napkin.

With a composting toilet, you simply do your business as usual, wipe your bum, deposit the toilet paper nearby your turd, and cover the lot with a layer of organic material such as sawdust, or, in my case, rice husks. I have discovered, however, that a woman who is used to dispensing with her turds using gallons of potable water requires gallons of organic material to convincingly cover any sized turd.

Okay, it's supposed to look like this, but better, when done.

I’ve decided to include a bath, as well– not just a shower, as I had earlier planned. I miss taking hot baths at night, as I did when I lived in Japan. I’m going to dabble with a building method known as laminated ferrocement for the waterproof bath basin. I’ll discuss this in detail if I can get even close to getting it to work. Having the bath, I’ll need more hot water than earlier anticipated, so two 55-gallon drums, painted black, insulated with rice husks, with reflective foil surrounding them, and covered with plate glass, will be my batch hot water heater. I’ll add an electric water heating element, if necessary. The bigger, raised tank, is the ordinary water tank that I envision. The system needs gravity to work. No reason not to paint it flat black, too. The carpet-like material acting as a roof is actually going to be thatch, a very cheap and durable material found in great abundance locally. Those nice, square beams will actually be round timber from some area that I intend to clear, if the cousin from Pakse hasn’t already sold my chainsaw.

This is a view from the weir of the crossing point. Flow is slow but the water is high.

The crossing point is about 20 or 25m upstream from the weir, which I’m standing on as I take the photo to the left. A number of boards in the weir are used to adjust the level of the water. When the stream is high and the crossing difficult to negotiate by motorbike, people (mostly relatives of the owner, Billy), remove some of the boards. I don’t want them to. An additional function of the crossing is to raise the stream’s water level behind it. This will make it possible to stock it with more rainbow trout. However, judging from the low flow during the relatively short dry season, I think I’ll be forced to harvest most of them each year before the dry season begins and stock again afterwords.

The first gravel bags go down, the back-breaking work begins.

I wanted Billy to work on the access road and was determined to do the crossing myself. I’d paid Billy and the Cousin from Pakse to complete the job, including filling in between and beside the concrete strips with dirt and applying sod. I paid them for a truckload of dirt to make it easier. However, not only did the dirt cost more than they expected, the Cousin from Pakse had promptly lost this money, and his mobile phone, and then, to top it off, he contracted malaria. This is the kind of thing that happens if I’m not on site. . . So, here I am, being determined to do all the work myself (except for the concrete, which I’m allergic to).

This is the progress I made during the first afternoon working on my own.

I’d taken two boards out of the slot in the weir to lower the water level a bit. This exposed most of the stream bed nicely. The biggest problem was the fact that the gravel was in the wrong place. It should have been within a few paces of me at all times, but it was in fact located up the access slope at the top of the hill, and my crossing wasn’t. Another problem is that gravel is damned heavy. Each polypropylene bag was to be filled with a just-barely-manageable load of 6 heaping shovelfuls. I’d hoped to be able to load 3 bags at a time in the wheelbarrow, but as I haphazardly began down the access slope with them, I confirmed a number of the fundamental principles of classical physics, principal amongst them being inertia. And since inertia comes from the Latin word, iners, meaning idle, or lazy, I could see no reason not to unload a bag right then and there. My determination to do this bit of the project on my own would gradually succumb to iners.

Billy removed the last boards in the weir, lowering the water lever further and highlighting my remarkable progress from the afternoon before.

I was taken by surprise to see Billy walking about expectantly the next morning after pulling out the remaining boards in the weir. Communication is not always smooth between us. The day before when I was at my little retirement shack trying to encourage myself to do something, Billy was around so I asked him if the wheelbarrow was up the hill at his shack. He confirmed that it was. By the time I’d gotten my sneakers on and progressed as slowly as possible to admire the crossing site before getting at it, he’d managed to bring the wheelbarrow, a shovel, and other instruments of destruction all the way down the hill and had parked them neatly at the crossing. So, I was to begin my task by pushing these items back up the hill to where I needed them.

After a laying a few courses of gravel bags, we began filling the void between them.

Now, there are some very good reasons why I accepted Billy’s offer (at least that’s how I interpreted it) to haul bags of gravel down the hill. First and foremost was the fact that it allowed me to concentrate my full attention on the extremely important, delicate, in fact, task of placing the gravel bags. It takes a certain knack and a rather exceptional, if brief, burst of energy to lay a bag down in such a way that the top of the bag is folded under and it is abutted firmly against another bag. Billy, I reasoned, also had a lower center of gravity which would help him manage the load down the hill, and narrower hips that would fit better than mine between the handles of the wheelbarrow.  Oh, and then I remembered the most important reason which rendered me guilt-free– I was paying him.  And so it was that Billy would go up the hill to fetch a load of bags and return. It was my job to unload the bags from the wheelbarrow. After successfully maneuvering all two bags into place, I would sit down in the shade and drink beer, considering future placement points the whole time, of course, and wait for Billy to return with another load.

By the afternoon of the third day we'd finished laying all the courses.

We took the dirt from the bottom of the hillside beside the access slope. This is where, someday, my aquaponics greenhouse and mushroom cave will be, so it would eventually have to be dug out, anyway. Billy formed large piles of dirt quite adeptly with a hoe and I assumed the task of filling the wheelbarrow each time he’d come back from dumping a load. The digging site was far enough away from the crossing that I could sit down and have a few sips of beer while I waited. The beer tasted even better when I’d go and check the progress, pacing around on the freshly dumped dirt, packing it firmly. I did this while Billy attacked the hillside again with his hoe.

By late afternoon we'd finished filling and tamping so Billy started on the formwork.

Progress on the third day went quicker than expected. My legs were sore from the first afternoon of going up and down that hill, and Billy, who’d done it twice as many times, was hurting, too. He’d filled the last of the bags, 7 or so, that I’d brought with me and, while he was feeding his pigs that morning, I drove past them on my way to the market to see if I could get some more. They were still there when I returned, so I tried something, something that I’d considered doing from the beginning, but a little voice in my head had called me a pussy for it– I was supposed to be getting fit, after all. So, I loaded 5 bags into the back of my Chinese SUV and drove down the hill to the stream crossing and unloaded them there. Billy caught on quickly and soon I was ferrying bags full of gravel as fast as he could fill them. Iners, but we were both happy for it. That afternoon we finished filling in with dirt.

A six-wheeler delivers sand and gravel down the access slope. Sigh. . .

I couldn’t stay any longer and, like I said, I’m allergic to mixing and carrying concrete, so Billy was paid for three more days of work to get the job done. To my utter dissatisfaction, Billy assured me that we needed more gravel and sand to complete the project. I looked at the piles at the top of the hill suspiciously. I considered the fact that, eventually, more would actually be needed down there for other projects, so I agreed to getting one 6-wheeler with half a load of sand and half a load of gravel. An odd memory came back to me as I watched that 6-wheeler go down the access slope towards the crossing with gravel. It reminded me of when I was 20 years old and had walked 10 or 12 days along the Tokaido, the ancient route linking Tokyo and Osaka. I’d given up part way through, as I often do, and returned to Tokyo by bullet train, in about 35 minutes.

Nothing like a campfire to untangle your thoughts.

Fire is a tool here. A child learns how to build and control a fire by about the age of 7. It is an important but mundane facet of daily life, very much as it would have been for ancestral humans and their immediate predecessor species, going back almost a million years, when fire was an omnipresent tool, of sorts. But I’m (escaping) from a “modern society” where fire is used more as a decoration than a tool. I should have outgrown playing with fire a long time ago, but I can’t keep from gazing into those burning, bright red embers. It was on the second evening I spent on my site, the cold wind blowing from behind, up my spine and down my bum crack (because my one and only sweater is too small), that I was rewarded with bursts of flames after each gust of wind, and a few moments of clarity.

Irish Bridge at Whitely Woods, Yorkshire.

The importance of this bridge is growing in leaps and bounds. In fact, it should no longer be called a bridge. Billy agrees that we could easily raise the water level upstream of it by 40cm or so. So, it’s going to be more of a water feature than a bridge, and closer to a dam in terms of function. I still want it to look something like the stream crossing shown here. Generally, there will always be water flowing over it. The neighbors have confirmed that they don’t mind driving their motorbikes through about 10cm of water.

Step 4. Add river gravel, and voila!

The way I’m going to go about building this crossing is pretty much the same as before. I’ll use woven polypropylene bags containing river gravel on the two sides, although I think one row on each side is sufficient, lay down concrete pipes, enough to take on the entire flow in the dry season, and fill the area in between with dirt and more river gravel. It’s just going to be higher than I originally intended, but there is a reason for this. Okay, so it hardly justifies the “Moments of Clarity” title, because, after all, I’m just going to raise the water level higher than I had planned and keep it running over the crossing throughout the year. But keep reading.

I sometimes wonder if there is a Lao word for “progress.” It seems to be a concept quite beyond them. But, to be fair, even if they don’t have a word for “progress,” they probably don’t have one for “depression,” “unhappiness,” etc.  So, it’s a wash. . .  I’d been forewarned that the access road and my little retirement home “wasn’t quite completed.” Billy spent some time in Vientiane because a family member was sick, dying, perhaps, and he’s got family in the National Assembly, so, yes, by all means, take good care of them.

Nope, not sleeping here tonight.

But my not quite completed retirement home was a good bit less completed than I expected. It seemed a bit, well, more “airy” than I desired. Like, all four walls, ceiling and floor, open. In fact, if a pile of logs had, for whatever reason, just fallen from the sky, then that is roughly what you would find. But what a view! Okay, fair enough, it’s not a sheer 14 meter drop, but it would be a bumpy ride down to the bottom.  So, fully expecting to spend the night in my little house, I reluctantly went into town and checked into a guest house.

At first I though he was just trying to get me to help carry them, but how amazing, planks cut on site. . .

Progress, if the word exists here, must be preceded by “painfully” or “excruciatingly” slow. Two full days later, I was determined to sleep in my unfinished retirement home. But I was thoroughly enjoying it all. I mean, the day before, when I was waiting for the crew to show up, this guy and his wife showed up, chatted with me despite my broken Lao, then proceeded through my land into the jungle. Later I heard the sound of a chainsaw, and I watched a huge tree fall from the cousin’s land. What’s that all about, I thought. But, of course, it was my floor. By the end of the second day there was neither a roof nor anything resembling walls, so I slept at a guest house again.

A little bit of mosquito netting will keep the wind out. Anyway, beer Lao in the cooler.

By the third day, there was something resembling a roof and a floor, so I was determined to stay there. This was, after all, an important moment for me. I’d had it played out in my mind for weeks. So I put up my mosquito netting and laid down my freshly purchased bedding. I was resolute about spending my first night there alone. I mean, I was a boyscout at one time in my life, and I had the advantage of having a cooler full of Beer Lao. I had it all planned. A big fire, with seating for a number of my friends, reserved seating, of course, as I knew they could not attend. I was going to put the seats around the fire, take photos, etc., but, of course, my crew wouldn’t leave me alone. They just don’t understand that “I want to be left alone!” for Christ’s sake.

They just wouldn't let me enjoy the moment on my own. Okay. . . What the hell.

And so it was that Billy and the Cousin from Pakse suddenly showed up. I’d been mucking about for a few minutes trying to get the big fire going using kindling and such, and of course the Cousin from Pakse, assuming I haven’t got a clue how to do anything, has a piece of rubber inner tube with him. I mean, give me a liter of diesel fuel to pour over it, and I’ll get it going. Billy and I both complained about the smell. I took the time to show Billy what I intended to do with the stream crossing, and we discussed important matters, such as how beautiful Vietnamese girls are, as Billy had lived there for 6 years. It was then that Billy realized, though I’d told him many times, that the only useful skill I have is speaking Japanese. He threw at me a “Good morning!” and a “Good night!” and a “Young Japanese girls are very pretty, aren’t they?” to which we could not find any disagreement, because you know all these things if you’ve helped the Japanese build bridges build bridges, which I guess he must have done.

Skwerered pork, sliced potatoes, rice with herbs and stuff, and, most importantly, Beer Lao in a bowl.

I eventually drove them off and began making dinner. Of the most important things in life, I’d forgotten one of the least of them, a glass. The lack of importance is due to the fact that almost anything holds liquid. So I used a noodle bowl. In fact, I think I’ll always use the noodle bowl to drink beer. It wasn’t actually so cold that night, so I remember very little after that, as I slept so well, with just the sound of the waterfall beside me.

Almost liveable. Ah, but with the sound of the waterfall, what a pleasant sleep.

By the next night, I almost had walls. I mean, it looks like I have all the walls, but actually the wall on the far end wasn’t up yet. But, what an effect.  There is something about sitting around a fire. Something very primitive, I suppose. Anyway, this is my retirement home. It almost seems fine to me.

Irish Bridge at Whitely Woods, Yorkshire.

This is just a proposal, but I’m fairly comfortable with it. There may be an easier way, of course, so, as the Japanese say, if the door won’t open by pushing it, then I may have to try pulling it. Unlike a common Irish Bridge, or low water crossing, which is dry on top most of the year and only under water on certain occasions, I want to do it the other way around. This is simply because I like falling water. I’d like it to look a little bit like the one shown here. The illustrations that follow do not show a stepping stone crossing for people on foot, but it would be easy to incorporate.

This sandbag bridge, by Nobuho Nagasawa, is a work of art.

As people who know me probably suspect, I’d like to incorporate an unusual building technique. The technique is not as unusual as some would suspect, however, as it’s been implemented at an incredible scale during the floods that ravaged Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia. That’s right, sandbags.  The vision that most people have of sandbags, however, is that of deteriorated polypropylene bags baking in the sun after the flood waters have receded. Making a permanent structure out of them probably seems preposterous to most people. Well, pull up a sandbag and swing the lantern, and prepare to learn something that’s going to be entirely useless to you for the rest of your life.

Polypropylene bags full of gravel being tested. Serious stuff.

Your standard, woven, polypropylene bag for rice, or, whatever, will not rot under water or when buried. I read about a guy who built a dam with them and, disassembling some of it 6 years later, found that the bags were exactly the same as the day he had put them in. They are subject to degradation from extreme temperatures and UV light. Of course, anything can break or burst, but the tensile strength of polypropylene bags is nothing less than amazing. When you give the material a name like “high tensile strength polypropylene geotextile,” rather than “ordinary rice bag,” you’d almost be willing to pay a fortune for them. Under normal temperatures, and when protected from UV light, a one-bag-width wall of these, filled with gravel, has a load strength of over 120kN/m. That means that one linear meter of this stuff can hold up more than 12 tons. That’s about 10 times more than a 2″ x 6″ timber-framed bearing wall. And if this was a wall that could be protected from the weather, you could use moist, clay-rich earth for an even stronger wall without the need for the polypropylene material after it dried.

I've calculated that my ford could easily support this 16-ton APC.

As you will see, if you have the courage and stamina to keep reading, the load bearing  portion of my low water crossing will be (I mean, it’s a proposal, but I’ve pretty much convinced myself that it will work) two walls wide, each. It is also worth noting that I intend to render, or plaster, the outside with wire mesh (that sounds so much better than “chicken wire”) and mortar, as you would a normal house in this part of the world. That not only protects the bags from UV light, but increases strength by leaps and bounds. I’ve calculated that it could easily support the occasional M1126 Stryker ICV, but you’re not likely to see one as the locals can’t quite afford the $3.8 million price tag.

Step 1. Lay down about two courses of gravel-filled bags, add culverts.

It’s the dry season now, so now’s the time to get this done. Also, it will cause a fair amount of disturbance down stream, so I want to get it done before I start producing power. The first step will be to lay down about two courses of bags filled with gravel. Notice the running bond. At this point, the stream water can just run right over it. Then I’ll lay down the culverts. How many? Well, that will depend on how much water. I’d like to use just as many as it takes to channel all the water during the dry season.

Step 2. Build up with more gravel bags, pour the concrete planks, apply plaster skin.

After that bit is down it will just be a matter of building up more courses of gravel bags. Eventually, it will be above the stream’s normal surface level, and, hopefully, all the water will channel through the culverts. Applying the plaster skin will be the tricky part. A plaster skin isn’t necessary on the inside surfaces between the strips, but it looks better in the illustration.

Step 3. Fill the void between the strips with river gravel and local soil.

Next, I think I will be able to get away with simply filling in with river gravel first, and then local soil. And yes, that’s the color of our volcanic soil. It’s fairly important at this point that the stream does not flow over the top of the ford, so I’ve got to be pretty sure about the size and number of culverts. I suppose I could use one more than I think is necessary and plug it up later with a 30cm diameter cork or something.

Step 4. Add river gravel, and voila!

Finally, river gravel fills the 10cm high void between the concrete strips. I know I’m over simplifying the whole thing, but I’d appreciate any questions or comments. I’m particularly eager to get statements of outright praise for the idea, but I won’t get my hopes up.

The stream when the weir hasn't been tampered with.

Judging from the comments I’ve been receiving, I guess a little more explanation, in the form of illustrations, is needed. The illustration to the left shows, crudely, sort of what the stream looks like when all the boards are in place in the weir. The depth in front of the weir is really probably only about 45cm or so. I’m not at the site right now, so I can’t measure it.

This is what happens when they lower the water level.

When someone wants to go across the stream and it’s looking a bit hazardous, or just annoying, they pull up a plank or two in the weir and lower the water level a little. The water continues to flow, of course, just a little shallower. The flow rate at the crossing is fairly slow as it’s comparatively wide and perhaps deep (I haven’t waded across it because you can walk across the weir). I’m surprised they just haven’t filled it in with something, but I presume rocks and such would make it a bumpy ride on a motorbike. I plan to keep the water at the weir at a fixed height.

This is sort of what I'm contemplating.

This is roughly what I’m contemplating, but it is completely out of proportion and, hopefully, much easier to do in reality. Everything is really much more subtle. I’ll have to confirm, of course, that I can raise the level of the water behind this ford as much as I’d like, but I’m pretty sure I can.

I've got to make it possible to cross this stream.

I have a problem. Some of the locals pass through my land to get to their coffee plantations. There are other ways for them to get to their properties, so I’m discouraging this, to a certain extent, but not denying a moderate level of access. The more I improve my own access, however, the more likely they are to take advantage of it. The problem is not really making it possible to cross the stream, because it is already possible, it is precluding passers-through from trying to lower the water level by removing the planks at the weir, a little further downstream, so they don’t get their ankles wet.

Darned plank puller-outers at it again. I'll stop you!

Needless to say, this practice would disrupt power production, as the water source for the power will be taken from the very same place that the planks are, and sometimes are not. And the best way to discourage this practice, is to make it ineffective. So the goal is not to build a pretty bridge. I don’t really want one, but it might be possible to kill two birds with one stone, or at least frighten them both off.

Yorkshire Bridge, somewhere in Ireland.

By now you must be wondering what an Irish Bridge is (the Irish call them Yorkshire Bridges, by the way). Well, the other day, while my composting worms were plotting their escape and total conquest of the interior of my car, I was drinking with Yorkshire Bob and some other Brits in my pub. The Irish Bridge (a.k.a. Yorkshire Bridge) had been suggested to me earlier in the day by Fergus, my worm guy, who’s not from Yorkshire or Ireland, but is still a Brit, himself.  In an earlier life he worked as a civil engineer around the world for various large general contractors. He even helped build an international airport in the middle of the desert in Iraq decades ago that has never been used but can still be viewed on Google Earth. When I mentioned the concept to Yorkshire Bob, he balked, shook his head furiously, and told me not to do anything until he visits me at the site again in early January. There was lots of joking. . . yeah, Irish Bridge, because it’s under water. I thought he was going to cuff me just for suggesting such a preposterous idea. But let’s look at what Wikipedia has to say:

A low water crossing (also known as an Irish bridge, Yorkshire bridge, causeway in Australia, low level crossing or low water bridge) provides a bridge when water flow is low. Under high flow conditions, water runs over the roadway and precludes vehicular traffic. This approach is cheaper than building a bridge to raise the level of the road above the highest flood stage of a river, particularly in developing countries or in semi-arid areas with rare high-volume rain.

Irish Bridge at Whitely Woods, Yorkshire.

This is exactly what I want, although “precludes vehicular traffic” is not my goal. Even when they pull out the planks from my weir, they still get their ankles wet on their motorbikes or are mid-wheel level in their Hyundai light-weight trucks. What’s depicted in the the bridge, or ford, to the right, is what I’m looking for. Note the stepping stones for persons passing through on foot.  Any comments? Any at all?