What I want to finish but probably won't [Part 1]

This is what some of those developed roads look like now in Churchill, Montana. It is a haven for children to explore. In this tiny town there are llamas, ostriches, horse pastures, so many cows, apple trees, a few cranky neighbors, many many really nice elderly people, a retirement home, neighborhood kids, a store , a back path to walk to the other side of Churchill, and a little stretch of trees that has the perfect fort spot. 


1. Tina, Erica, and I began to build a swimming pool in Churchill when all the new houses were going up. We got shovels and determined that it had to be a comfortable size and that we had to be able to swim and still not bump each other.

      a. We had shovels and our land plotted out. It was a carefully picked spot, right by the pavement where the street dead-ended, but would eventually become part of the street when new houses were built. We chose this spot for one very simple reason. Easy access.

      b. We dug about one foot down, about 4 feet wide and 8 feet long. That took a couple hours. And it was hot. And we were sweating. Luckily we all had seen our fathers use shovels before, so we knew the basics--point shovel downward, step one foot on flat shovel spot (No, I don't think a snow shovel will work for this...I mean you can try it but...), stand your weight on the shovel entirely, and then jump because you're a little girl still and don't weigh that much and this is rocky soil.

      c. We dug a deep end, about 2 feet deep, and then decided it was time to fill 'er up.

               Problem #1: Our carefully selected spot was hundreds of yards from any of our houses.
               Temporary Solution #1: Connect all of our hoses together and run it down the street from Tina's house. Yes, there would be a lot of potential kinks in the hose to worry about (I hate those) but it could work.
              Problem #2:  The hoses didn't work. They kept kinking up and it was going to take forever for the water to actually get from Tina's house to the chosen spot, and we didn't find that much hose anyway. It seemed that all of our neighbors had put all their hoses away in garages, but boy if those hoses had been laying around outside...
              Temporary Solution #2: Fill buckets now at the spot where the hose leaves off. This worked for about three rounds.
              Problem #3: Unfortunately it only filled about one inch of the pool and when we returned from refilling our buckets the water sunk into the earth and created a muddy surface. Montana is impossibly dry.
             Temporary Solution #3: Find tarp to place in the bottom of our pool. All we found were bits of tarp that our families had used for camping. They all had holes in them.

     d. Our pool didn't work out. In retrospect, we would have needed a persistent maintenance crew to keep refilling the pool as it drained through the tarp holes and to clean for when the wildlife bathed in it and a security system to keep the boys out of our turf. We would have needed to convince the town to build the road around our pool and if we were really persuasive to put in a fence so no cars crashed into it. We could have chosen a better spot. Maybe one a little more off to the side.

So we abandoned our project. We filled it in a little but the area looked dangerous and maybe a little hazardous now, and what we did next I'm not sure; we probably just ate a Popsicle and stuck our feet in the crick that ran by my house, a natural little pool we could have played in all day.