I knew that somewhere around the house there was an envelope of photos I had taken of the dam being built. These were in the (my) pre-digital age, but I knew they could be scanned and presented for your entertainment and edification. If only I could find them. I looked in all of the usual places, but they eluded me.

It so happened that when Rachel was here a few weeks ago, she and Libby started “scrapbooking” and brought up boxes of “scrap” from the basement. Then one morning I found an envelope beside my computer. Within it were the photos of the dam construction.

Memory is a funny thing. In my memory I had taken impressive pix showing in instructive detail all of the important stages of the dam construction. Perhaps I should have continued to live in my memory.

Not only are there fewer of these pix than I remembered, but they are all pretty miserable as photos. Take that down a generation or two as they go from print to scan to pdf to jpeg to here and you get a sad reduction in quality.

Still, this photo will give you some sense of the construction of the dam. I took this shot standing in what would become the pecan plantation. I’m looking to the west, and what you see is the notch in the dam before it was filled in. This notch was a route the dozer man used to go in and out of the lake bed. It is also where he laid the drain pipe so that it would be at the lowest part of the lake bed before he buried it with the rest of the dam atop it. Curiously, this part of the dam is water tight. I would have expected it to leak, but I suppose the part of the dam built here is no different from the other parts of the dam (well, expect for the parts that do leak).

You can see one of the burn piles to the right. That’s all gone; I have a photo of it I will share with you that merits a little discussion.

Missouri calendar:

• Voles and mice feed on grass and seeds under the snow.

Posted by: Roundrockjournal    Source

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