Surprise Water Fountain for Wife Turns into Hellish Weekend Project for Tigard Man
By: Kristen Forbes
[This article was published in the Tigard-Tualatin-Sherwood Times, Beaverton Valley Times, Lake Oswego Review and West Linn Tidings in a special section called "Bloom 2008" on May 8, 2008].
In a quiet Tigard backyard, a gentle stream of water bubbles from a rock fountain. This serene fountain is the primary focus in a yard that is otherwise occupied by greenery and flowers. There is something so calming, so Zen, about this fountain. Since I know the owner of the backyard, I decide to ask him the background of this glorious water feature. I explain to him that it would be the perfect story to highlight in a special garden section in the newspaper.
The owner shakes his head. He cannot go public with the tale of his fountain, he explains. As it turns out, there is a story behind it. A story that is not at all calm, nor Zen, but what some might call “idiotic.” The owner hesitates.
I ask if it would help to keep his identity anonymous. He agrees.
The owner, whose name may or not be Paul or Earl or Richard or Mario or Stewart (for the purpose of the story, let’s call him Sherman), shares the saga of the water fountain.
“About four years ago,” Sherman says, “I decided to create a backyard water feature for my wife. We had talked about doing this previously and when she went away for a long summer weekend, I decided the timing was perfect. “
Sherman sighs. “I couldn’t have been more wrong,” he says.
The week before his wife left for her trip, Sherman bought various items (a pump, liner and tubing) he thought would be required for installation.
“My goal,” he says, “was to create a small pond, cover the pond with plastic and wire, then cover those with a random assortment of rocks and pebbles. Atop all of this I envisioned a three-and-a-half foot rock that water would flow up into and out the top, cascading back down into the covered pool.”
It certainly sounds like a well-devised plan. With his wife away for the weekend, Sherman put the plan into action. He drove his car, which may or may not be a tiny Ford Focus, to a rock place off the Tualatin-Sherwood Road. He chose a large rock that was pre-drilled for water piping and kindly asked the gentleman working at the rock establishment for assistance getting the rock into the trunk of his car.
The rock man laughed and walked away, then came back with a fork lift. He maneuvered the rock from the fork lift to a nearby scale and revealed the number to Sherman: 600 pounds.
“To answer your question from earlier,” the rock man said, “There’s no way in hell we can get this rock in your car. Do you have a truck?”
One would hope that if Sherman did have a truck, he would have opted to take that to the rock establishment that day, instead of his measly Ford Focus. Alas, Sherman did not own a truck, nor could he think of any friends who owned trucks. The rock man suggested renting one.
Sherman rented a truck from a store in Tigard and was told in no uncertain terms that it needed to be back within the hour. Not a problem, he reasoned, thinking he just needed to do a simple round-trip to Tualatin.
Off he went.
Back at the rock shop, his 600-pound stone was still resting on the scale where it had been left. The rock man quickly loaded it into the bed of Sherman’s rented truck. As Sherman got settled behind the wheel and was about to drive away, the rock man stopped him.
“By the way,” he said. “How are you going to unload that thing?”
“I think I’ll just push it out onto the driveway, then take it from there,” Sherman responded quickly.
The rock man scratched his head. “If you do that,” he warned, “you’ll crack your driveway.”
The rock man gathered several extra wood palettes to aid him. Sherman mulled over the mental visual of a cracked driveway on his drive home. Then he remembered he had several bags of peat and bark chips, which he could add to the palettes. He reasoned that with enough cushioning, all of his problems would be solved.
“I never took physics or logic in college,” Sherman explains.
During the drive home, the gigantic rock shifted from the back of the pickup bed to the front. Once in his driveway, he realized there was no way he could budge a 600-pound rock from the front of a truck bed. What he needed, he reasoned, was a hill.
Sherman drove a few blocks over to Bull Mountain Road and saw the steepest road he could find.
“I started the truck up the hill and when no traffic was coming from either direction, I gunned the truck upwards. Nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. On the third attempt, I gunned it, stopped suddenly and the great rock shifted in the truck bed like a marble on a plate. Carefully, gingerly, I returned the truck to my house.”
45 minutes had passed since he’d rented the truck in Tigard.
“For the next half hour,” Sherman explains, “I strained and groaned and contorted and cursed and laughed and prayed, all in an attempt to rock the rock over the tailgate and onto the driveway into the waiting pillow of peat, bark chips and wood palettes. No amount of blood, sweat or tears was going to make this happen.”
Several of his neighbors, at this point, stopped their neighborly conversations to watch this process. Some pointed. Some laughed. The clock was over the hour mark. When the pointing and laughter subsided, two neighbors took pity on Sherman and helped him maneuver the rock onto its pillow, which it promptly flattened. Sherman thanked his neighbors and hopped back into the truck, now twenty minutes past the hour mark.
That’s when he heard “one of those horrible grinding sounds that drivers never want to hear from their vehicles.” The panel lights remained dark, the radio stayed silent and Thomas watched his watch tick from 25 minutes late to 26 minutes late.
“I held down the clutch only part way, turned the key one last time and with a gigantic belch of smoke, the truck started,” he says.
Sherman and the truck limped down 99, finally arriving back at the store 35 minutes late. When he went to turn off the truck, the key wouldn’t turn off. For ten more minutes, Sherman struggled. Finally, he left the truck running and went inside to inform the company of the problem.
“One by one by one by one by one by one, employees from the rental area came out to the truck – six of them in all. They poked, they prodded, they scratched their collective heads. They strained and groaned and contorted and laughed and probably prayed. They looked inside the cab, they looked under the hood, looked back at me, looked at the bed of the truck. They looked at the manuals in the glove box, looked at other trucks and looked at other trucks’ manuals from their gloveboxes.”
After paying up on his overdue account, Sherman slinked away. Once back home, Sherman and his neighbors/ new best friends struggled to get the rock strapped into place on a dolly. It then took several more hours wheeling the dolly to the far recesses of his backyard.
Sherman spent the entire next day digging the pond by hand. As night fell on Sunday, he looked around the backyard. 24 cement blocks stood vertically. It became painfully clear that his “weekend project” would not be completed by the time his wife returned.
The next day, his wife came home and looked around.
“She glanced out into her once-beautiful backyard, saw the sprawling pit, the giant stone and what appeared to be 24 grave markers standing guard. She was not happy,” Sherman says.
“It took the next two weekends until the pit was covered by its liner, the cement blocks were in place, the plastic support was down, the monolith was in its proper location, the plumbing and electrical wiring were ready to go, a secondary outdoor display light was added, the stones put in place and the fountain turned on and working properly before the smile returned to her face.”
As for the truck? Curious about its fate, Sherman stopped into the place where he had rented from and inquired if they had a truck available.
The sales clerk smiled sweetly and said, “Well, we normally would have one, but some idiot ruined our truck yesterday and once we got it to stop running, we had to have it towed to the shop. We have no idea when it will be ready again.”
For all Sherman knows, that truck is now resting in truck heaven. As for his rock fountain – all is well that ends well. And after a lot of blood, sweat and tears and maybe a smidgen of uncommon sense, Sherman has a lovely water feature displayed in his yard.
Even his wife agrees that it looks nice.
Kristen Forbes is a freelance writer living in Tigard. To view her blog, visit www.krissymick.blogspot.com
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