My first fire of 2013. I think about sitting around a fire at Roundrock a lot. Most of our trips there are only for the day, and I’m always reluctant to start a fire only to drive away from the coals a few hours later. Yes, I have plenty of water in those ugly milk jugs to kill the embers, and right now I have a full, full lake for more water if I need it, but I’m still nervous about it. I’d much rather have the coals burn themselves out through the night and then give them a last pour in the morning. Plus, it’s nice just to sit in the dark before a fire and listen to the forest sounds.

So last weekend was our first overnight of the year and thus my first chance for a fire. We cooked burgers over that fire, and a few beers might have been consumed, but our evening ended early and I didn’t sit for hours and hours before the flames, contemplating the universe. I suppose I was tired from tending the pines and throwing rocks in the holes in the south spillway.

Flike, of course, sees a fire as merely a temporary interruption in the stick throwing regimen. You see him there, waiting for me to return to the road for a session.

May is a busy month. I’m not sure when I’ll see another overnight, but I’ll be looking for it.

Sometimes (even if it’s by accident) we time our visits just right. I was standing at the cabin, gazing into the forest, and spotted something blooming. It wasn’t until the next day that my feet carried me over to that part of the forest and I realized we were in our woods just as the cherry trees were blossoming. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in my woods at this exact time before.

Nor, lately, have I been able to make the macro function on my little camera work as well. That’s a pretty good photo above, at least for my skills and equipment.

The green is beginning to blush on the trees now, but I was tickled to see this white.

The cherries on these trees are tiny, and though I suspect they are edible, I’m not going to try. I’d probably get an angry stomach, and the critters would do better with them anyway.

I hold my found artifact in my hand (from yesterday’s post, of course) and try to imagine the years it has been around, the hands that formed it, the hands that used it, how it was lost or left behind. Is it a thousand years old? Older? How much time has transpired between its last connection with human hands and now mine? It’s a fruitful and fulfilling path of inquiry even if I know that I’ll never know the answer.

And yet even a thousand years is hardly the blink of an eye compared to the time represented by the many, many fossils that were all around the spot where I found the artifact. Their span of time is beyond human imagination. Hundreds of millions of years.

The spiral-shaped fossil in the photo above is, I think, an ammonite. As a classification, that’s about as broad as it gets, and as a classification that’s about as precise as I can get. Ammonites were swimming or floating invertebrates, and their closest living relative is the nautilus. The must have thrived in the shallow sea that once covered the land we now call Missouri.

Sorry about the quality of the photo below. The sun was in the wrong part of the sky when I was in the right part of the spillway. This fossil is raised from the surface of the bedrock, and I suspect it was revealed when the dozer originally cut the spillway.

My daughter-in-law Amber is a great lover of natural history, and the next time she is out at Roundrock, I intend to bring her over to the spillway bedrock and let her make discoveries of her own.

We returned to Roundrock last weekend for an overnight; that’s two weekends in a row that we were there. The trip was supposed to be merely for relaxation, but, of course, I found myself pulled toward a couple of chores that needed doing.

One was to do more filling work of the hole that was developing on the south spillway. I had devoted an hour to throwing rocks in that hole last weekend, and I thought another hour or two just might fill it, and maybe I’d avoid having the berm on the spillway being completely washed out.

I didn’t need to worry about filling that hole. In the week since I’d been down, a couple of big rains had gouged even bigger holes that were even greater threats to the integrity of the spillway berm.

The mess you see above is the south spillway, a week later. It’s hard to tell, but some of the holes on that left side are three feet deep. That exposed area is where the rushing water had eaten into the berm. Another overflow event and I expect the berm will blow out, allowing the rushing water to pour into the pine pecan plantation far too close to the dam for my comfort. (That spread of gravel at the bottom of the spillway has been washed there in the last two years. It used to be grassy there.)

So I ventured over to the spillway on Saturday soon after we arrived and saw the impossible task before me. I could spend the rest of my life throwing rocks in that forming canyon, and another big rain event would simply wash them down the hill. I grew despairing and figured I had to call the dozer man to come out with his big machinery to tackle the problem.

On Sunday I thought about a different approach. About halfway down the spillway, the water tends to stay on the right side (far from the berm), kept in place by a crack in the bedrock there that forms a natural channel. At the halfway point, the bedrock is no longer cracked and the water spills out, crossing the spillway and gouging out a new channel in the gravel and dirt. My thought was that if I could create a new channel in the gravel and dirt on the right side of the spillway, the water would be steered away from the berm a little longer.

So Flike and I headed over there with the pickaxe and shovel. (I carried those. Flike carried a stick.) Then I did a little work at the top of the spillway to remove some gravel so that the water would more easily flow into the natural channel formed by the split in the bedrock. That didn’t take long (and probably didn’t make much of a difference), and I headed down to the halfway point where the natural channel ends and the dirt and gravel begin. And I couldn’t bring myself to dig.

What I really need to do is fill the hole, not create a new one. An ideal spillway would be covered with a carpet of grass to help prevent erosion, and that’s what I have at the point where I was going to start digging. (As you can see on the right side of the photo above.) The water is getting diverted here, but that’s not the fault of the grass. And it seemed foolish to destroy part of the spillway that was actually the way it needed to be.

So I threw rocks in the holes again, aware of how futile that was. And for a break, I used the pickaxe to dig a little in the channel in the bedrock, to widen it where I could and allow it to carry more water.

And that’s when it happened.

Something I’ve been wanting to happen for more than a dozen years.

Something I’ve been hoping for since I first started stomping about my Ozark forest.

Something I was beginning to despair would ever happen in my life.

. . .

I found a Native American artifact!

Look at that beauty!

Here’s the other side:

I have no idea what it is. Obviously it’s too large to have fit on an arrow. Perhaps it’s a spearhead? Or maybe a knife blade. Nor do I know who made it or how old it might be. (I’ve been told that the larger they are, the older they are, but a given use could determine size as much as age, I think.)

The bottom is broken off, as you can see, and that might have shed more light on its original use or craftsmanship. It’s made of chert (I think) and it’s symmetrical in width and depth. Plus there is clear evidence of knapping on its edges.

This had washed into the spillway sometime in the last two years and was buried in mud. (This part of the spillway was broken out of the bedrock, so the artifact couldn’t have gotten there before then.)

Suddenly my woes with the spillway seemed unimportant. I washed the artifact in the water that was trickling down the spillway and examined it from all angles. It wasn’t giving up any of its secrets though.

It sits beside me on my desk. I pick it up frequently and look it over. Now, of course, I expect to go out to my woods and find artifacts all the time. I’ll let you know how that goes.

What may look to you like mayhem and mess is actually what I like to call the south spillway. This is the first avenue of exit for too much water in my little lake (after the overflow drain), and it’s been busy lately.

We’ve had a wet spring so far; the lake is at full pool, and the overflow drain has been working constantly, at least during our visits. So just about any new rainfall will put the spillway to work. (The north spillway also showed signs of recent use, but it seems to be a bit higher, so the water level must really be up for it to be called upon.)

The south spillway has now been eroded mostly to bedrock, at least near the top. Much of what you see is the fossil-laden bedrock that underlies this part of the hillside. The dozer man carved it a bit (see the wall to the right, which was broken out of the rock that was there). Thus it’s ideal for a spillway since it won’t erode (as quickly) as gravel or grass.

I’ve been shifting some rocks around at the top to steer the water to the right side of the spillway. The whole point of a spillway is to get the overflow water out of the lake in a way that doesn’t erode the dam itself. Thus the farther to the right it goes here, the farther from the dam it stays.

I can shift rocks, but I can’t shift bedrock, and that’s a problem. About a third of the way down the spillway, just around the bend you can see above, the water gets diverted to the left side (because of the lay of the bedrock), and it’s there that I found a nice hole about three feet deep just at the base of the spillway wall. The racing water (that must be a magnificent and frightening sight), had dug a hole and is threatening to blow out the side of the spillway, pouring water into the pecan plantation a bit too close to the dam for my comfort.

So I spent a lot of time on my last visit throwing big rocks into this new hole, hoping that they would arrest further erosion of the spillway wall and allow the water to rush down to the ephemeral pond that you can see in the photo. (That pond is pretty much year-round now, so it’s a misnomer to call it ephemeral.)

I’m not sure how soon I’ll be back at Roundrock, but I’ll need to visit this spot again and see about doing even more to fill that hole and divert the water better. Unless the side of the spillway is blown out by then and I’ll need to get the dozer man back.

This is the overflow pipe outlet at the base of the dam. It’s doing what it’s designed to do, which is to lead away all of the water pouring into the overflow basin. When I see this I know that my lake is full, which is reason for a happy dance.

In the days since I took this photo, there have been more rainy days than not in the Roundrock area. We’re having a wet spring so far, but I seem to recall that being the case last spring too, and then the summer drought came. Since I’ve long since forgotten the steps to a rain dance, I’m just going to have to trust to nature to keep my lake full, or not.

A couple of years ago I had this black pipe extended a dozen feet. This is the tip of the extension that you see. So before, the base of the dam began another twelve or so feet to the right. And the part below the pipe was eroding deeply. (As I think this bit is, but it’s too wet for me to check right now.)

That ugly white thing you see is the barrel that houses the valve I can open to drain water from the bottom of the lake if I want. So far, I’ve never wanted to. In fact, I’ve sometimes wished I could drain water into the bottom of the lake. I’ve only turned that valve twice. Once when it was new just to see how neat it was and once much later after I had dug out around the barrel after it had become partially buried with mud.

I hope to get out to the woods this weekend (some of my plants have arrived from the Conservation Department), and the weather report suggests I’m going to see a full lake again.

These fellows (and females) were waiting for us on the very full lake when we were out to Roundrock a week ago. They never came close enuf for me to get a better shot — my little camera was on extreme zoom — but we pulled out the binoculars later and got as good a look at them as we could. Then we got down the few bird ID books from the little library we keep in the little cabin . . . and could not identify them.

Here’s what I can tell you about them:

• males had black heads with what looked like blue blush around the eyes
• males had black bodies with white wings
• all had white-ish bills
• females were variegated dun colored
• they were diving ducks
• they were extremely skittish and left whenever we approached the water

The books we had at the cabin didn’t have any matches. At home we have one book that suggests they may have been lesser scaups. (That book will be going to the cabin with us on our next visit.) Their description seems to closely match what we saw, and their range overlaps the Ozarks. Plus they are listed as diving ducks.

The area directly across the lake from the cabin we’ve come to call Duck Cove. It’s not much of a cove, but it does seem to be favored by the ducks that visit.

I’ve mentioned here a few times, I think, that I’m trying to create a grassy oasis in the middle of my oak/hickory Ozark forest. I’m told that my forest was part of a larger cattle ranch and that most of what is now forest was once grassland. That’s why most of my trees are 30-40 years old, dating from the time when my 80 acres were left fallow.

I don’t suppose the cattle barons cultivated native grasses. One conservation agent told me that non-native fescue is considered the “grass that ate the county.” Nonetheless, there is a small hillside in the middle of my forest that doesn’t have trees and is covered with native grasses. That’s what you see in the photo above.

When my feet carry me to the area, I try to do a little more clearing, pushing back the encroaching forest and clearing the scrub that somehow comes up in the middle of it all. I’m making slow progress, but it’s discernable to my eye. So far it’s been easy work, too. I just lean over with my loppers and cut away a little bit more each time I pass through. (Okay, there was that one time when I pulled and tugged and dragged a fallen cedar of good size from the middle of this area, but mostly it’s easy work.) If I’m going to continue to expand this area, however, I’ll need to get serious with my chainsaw. The trees that are on the perimeter are too big for my handsaw (or at least my level of ambition with a handsaw). But it’s honest work, and I don’t mind doing it.