once upon a wall - when catastrophe comes calling

Setting your scene.

I live in the great Pacific Northwe(s)t, and that last bit, wihout the “s”, has been particularly and catastrophically true recently (see news coverage of western Washington floods in the last gasp of 2025) Put a pin in that for a moment. The place in which I live, here in the great PNW, is an elderly house built in the 1970’s, in a heavily wooded area, situated on a flat(ish…) slab of land held up on a VERY VERY STEEP SLOPE by a retaining wall at the back which was built to create that flat piece of ground to build a house on. I never really saw the wall itself at all because doing so would have necessitated a scramble down that VERY VERY STEEP SLOPE that exists around it in order to get to the bottom of it and I am no longer really able to scramble down anything at all – I use a cane on FLAT surfaces, dammit. All I could tell you – because of what I could observe from up here on top of the wall – that it appeared to have been built out of railroad ties. those heavy solid wooden logs. The top ones, those visible to me, were moss covered and pretty, and when we first moved into this house back in 2003 they looked pretty solid.

Fast forward to those heavy rains of the tail end of 2025, when I suddenly noticed that my wall looked like a landshark had taken a large bite out of it, and there was a section of the wall where those top timbers had completely disappeared and all that was left was a crumbling dirt edge.

I called in someone able bodied enough to go down there and take a look. They brought back photos that made my heart stop. The wall that was holding up the ground on which my house lives…was imploding. There was a bulge. There were two places where the wood had completely disintegrated and was coming apart.

“THis is a critical failure,” they told me gravely. “It needs fixed NOW.”

A flurry of activities followed. I called in a second quote for the job, which came in at $3k more than the first guy, and THESE people looked at the paved porch at the back of the house under the upstairs deck, and looked at the poles supporting that deck, and said, this thing is coming DOWN if anything further happens, these poles need stablizing and/or complete replacement. It was true that those poles (one of them specifically, put another pin in that) were leaning at crazy angles, and the paved area (which had been laid down by us in 2003) was starting to look decidedly lumpy, and had arguably been done at not-too-great-a-cost by a local handyman type. The third people I called in (my father always said get three quotes for anything…) came in, took a look, reiterated that the retaining wall was a catastrophe waiting to happen, and also warned me not to go out on the deck until it had been fixed. They were the most expensive quote I received… but they also said that they could start the next day. So I panicked completely and said, do it.

How I was going to pay for this (ALL the quotes were five figures…) I had no idea. Someone suggested putting up a GoFundMe, and so i did – that’s still open and gathering in drips and drops but in two major waves of support, especially from fandom (whom I am so humbly thankful for!) it gathered in almost half of the quoted price. I was able to make a down payment on the job. GOing forward, well, who needs to eat. I”ll make sure the cats are fed and the utilty bills get paid and as for the rest, i’m probably on a Great Wall diet now until I can pay off the rest of what this cost.

THey started on a ghastly January day, in freezing rain. They brought in these mammoth rocks, that came in three sizes – Large, Extra Large, and Kaiju. THey lugged the rocks down that steep steep slope often one at a time in a wheelbarrow, and then they hand-built a retaining wall of those rocks that included proper drainage (which my original wooden pallisade apparently didn’t boast), and then they poured in soil on the top, and then coarse gravel on top of that, and then fine gravel on top of THAT, and then more soil, and then finally a layer of cedar mulch to finish off,

Then they turned to the paved porch. They tore it all up. they built another rock wall around where it used to be, taking out the original wooden framing, they poured in sand, then gravel, then they used a pounding machine of some sort to basically “pave” and pound down the gravel into a more or less solid substrate. then they poured in more sand. then they levelled it. then they re-laid the pavers. In between all of that was one soul shattering day when they replaced three of the five poles that were supporting my deck – retrieve that pin I mentioned earlier and let me mention that one of those poles (stuck into the original pavers and wet sand without so much as a protective sleeve on it) *was starting to rot*. Don’t go out on the deck, indeed. But they did all this “in situ” as it were, taking out individual poles while supporting the entire deck on temporary support beams and by the end of that day I was pretty much in tiny semi-hysterical pieces on the floor. They also put in extra trusses to shore up what they considered to be a weak support system for the kind of deck that it was supposed to be supporting.

THis all went on for two weeks. Two weeks of them arriving just after 8 AM in the morning, and leaving when it became too dark to work (around 4, 4:30PM every day).

On the Friday of the second week of their sojourn, January 16, they scattered some gravel on the driveway that they had somewhat dug up with all the heavy trucks that were coming and going and smoothed that over… and then the last truck finally left.

It’s done. They are gone. once upon a wall – well – the old wall is dead, long live the wall.

I?… am dead on my feet. I hadn’t had a migraine for a while before this but I got one on the day after they were replacing the poles. My house, which had literally felt unsafe for me and my cats to live in, finally seems… on a solid footing… once again. But the price – financially, and physically – was high, and I am left sitting here counting the cost. Some pictures of the epic Once Upon A Wall journey below.

Before: