The Southfield house was situated on 7 acres, on the end of a ridge where two ravines converged. I was looking for a specific word for this landform, and was amused to find that if it were jutting into the sea it would be a “ness”. Southfield is far from the sea, and the water to the east was a creek (we called it a river) that was a branch of the Rouge River. To the west was an unnamed brook that slowed to a trickle in the heat of the summer.
It was this brook that had patiently carved the western-most of the ravines on which the Southfield house was perched, and we called this cooler, quieter hideaway “the valley”. A timber stairway allowed one to pick their way down into the valley, where you could find a pump house, a concrete dam that the brook had undercut, and a grassy area that might have been a small pond at one time.
After one winter’s disappointing effort to create a skating rink with plastic sheeting on the lawn in front of the house, Ted lobbied Art for an infrastructure project in the valley. We should fix the dam, run electricity down to the pump house, and re-dig the pond, Ted said. Art was a generous and enthusiastic benefactor for such projects, and looking back, he agreed to the project far too easily.
In short order, Art had magically summoned a bulldozer, and the operator kept at it, pushing mud out of the pond area, onto the banks, until he grew concerned he’d not be able to extricate his machine. Another good sport, to be sure. You were asking about permits for riparian and watercourse modifications? It never occurred to us to ask, and fortunately, never occurred to anyone else to tell.
That left us with large blocks of clay-rich mud drying around the pond. We had a neighbor bring over their jeep with a snowplow to try leveling it a bit, but made no progress. In the end, the long-suffering Ford garden tractor with its snowplow got it done, and now we had the potential for a skating rink.
Recall that the brook had undercut the concrete dam. You would have to have been there to believe Art’s enthusiasm for the repair. And I wonder if another brother had joined the project too? For this, Art came up with a number of bags of ready-mix concrete, and an electric concrete mixer. We strung together all our extension cords, and got to work. Art built a cofferdam to hold back the creek from the undercut area, then piled in all the rocks and masonry debris we could find, and sealed it up with concrete. Somehow this required Art to be in the water well above his knees as we worked. And this project also occasioned perhaps the only time I can recall Art counseling Ted to encourage electrical safety, as Ted was trying to plug in the wet electrical cords while standing in mud (long before ground fault protection was invented). Doing it quickly was not sufficiently safe, Art noted, and he encouraged Ted to dry them out and move to a dryer location.
Finally, we could fit the boards in the sluice way of the dam to fill the pond. Hour by hour the water crept up, applying more and more pressure to our repair, and creeping out into the newly excavated area. After a day or so, it reached the top of the spillway, and the pond was full – and there were a few areas of dirt remaining where we were hoping to be skating! A row of bricks on the spillway were the finishing touch, with the extra 2 inches bringing the water level up enough to flood the entire area as needed.
The last touch was electricity for pumping water to smooth the rink, and for lights. At Montgomery Wards, Ted got a coil of insulated aluminum wire suitable for overhead stringing. Ted ran the wire from tree to tree, to the main power pole, and finally to the house where we found the original “weatherhead” for the pump house power. Before long, we had lights and power for the skating rink. We got away with a serious mistake on this part of the project, connecting aluminum wire directly to copper, in the house, with no junction box. Who knew? Fortunately, after a few years, it went completely open circuit, instead of becoming one of the hazardous resistive connections that have given aluminum wire a bad reputation. It was Ted’s mistake, but Art’s charmed existence apparently covered the entire project!
We had a great time. Ted’s friends all wanted to play hockey, and with the lights we could play until late. And it provided never-ending entertainment to keep things going – breaking through the ice with the tractor, freezing and bursting a pump, and adding the skating rink to the snow plowing project for every snow. Good times!