When I first learned that the gullies along most county roads in the Southwest are referred to as a bar ditches, I thought they were named for the unfortunate drivers who’d had a few too many drinks before heading home and ended up in them. I was wrong, though ample circumstantial evidence exists to make a case for updating the etymology on the subject.

It seems a bar ditch, also referred to as a barrow pit, is just a channel dug for drainage purposes. Irrigation and runoff water sluices through the cattails and the willows, making a lush muddy mess along the way, all of it a wetland wonderland, as long as a person doesn’t have to get into one knee deep in order to work at unclogging a culvert.

Before I get around to complaining about my bar ditch, it’s only proper that I take a moment to extol the virtues of the entire rural, Southwestern drainage system. It has, after all, been entrenched in the county for a long, long time.

Habitat is a perk for the those creatures living near one. Nothing is so picturesque as a gallery of redwing blackbirds perched on the cattails, supervising the traffic while overseeing the future of their young. And then the foxes, skunks, pheasants, feral kittens and cats, dogs, raccoons and the occasional pair of ducks all make use of the dense growth prompted by a continuous supply of water to sustain and shelter their wild rural lives. Not so different from what the rural human beings do with it.

A bar ditch is also a blessing in the spring when the asparagus rises. Along the county lanes, and especially through the lowlands, vehicles often pull to the side of the road and someone in rubber boots or ragged tennis shoes with a sharp knife swiftly collects the tender asparagus shoots. Some of these asparagus beds have been producing so regularly and prolifically over the decades that other people would like to keep these locations for themselves. A distant gunshot or a crescendo of barking dogs is usually reason enough to consider relocating, down the road.

Then there are the plumes of dust that drivers spew into the air, often while traveling 20 miles per hour over the posted speed limit: gravel spitting from their tires like nails from a pneumatic gun. Add a stiff wind from the prevailing direction to relive the dust bowl era if you own a house abutting a county road. And add to that replacing a crushed mailbox every other year, and the mud that coats your vehicle’s lower panels up to the door handles when it rains, and you have a fairly obvious transition to the part about me complaining.

My house is in a peculiar position, given the natural rise and fall of the land. If I were to compare my property to a bathtub, the entrance to my driveway would be about where the drain is located. A 12 inch culvert, probably installed while all of today’s county commissioners were at Woodstock, takes the runoff from the bar ditch and channels it under the county road to the opposite side. That’s the plan, and for most of the year it kinda works.

When it doesn’t, like during a 20-minute downpour of spring, summer or autumn rain, a sheet of water rolls across of my neighbors’ properties and creates a lake where my yard used to be. I am happy to report that since I’ve lived here, the water has never washed out the county road, which is what a bar ditch is supposed to prevent, but once a year a drainage flood backs up toward my house, washes a channel out my driveway, spills over the grade, and turns my septic field into a wading pool. That’s when you’ll find me standing ankle deep in the brown sea, praying my shovel was a biblical staff.

The county has graciously scraped my bar ditch free of all the habitat that inhabits my property line so the water will flow better. Eventually it might install a shiny new, larger capacity culvert, one that will help handle the flow at these infrequent but peak runoff periods. What the county can’t do, of course, is move massive quantities of dirt until my house is situated on an engineered plateau, so it overlooks my driveway from a vantage that gives me enough perspective to understand why any sane person would have located the house here in the first place.

Speaking of perspective, now that the gulley has been scraped clean, temporarily eliminating the cattails, the willow, the asparagus and the weeds, I am suddenly able to notice every new beer bottle or can that gets tossed overnight from the window of a moving vehicle, and I’m beginning to reassess my initial interpretation about why people call it a bar ditch.

– David Feela