Not glamorous work, but it pays the bills and it teaches you a lot about how land behaves when gravity and water decide to have a conversation. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned after 30 years of digging holes and fixing other people’s mistakes, it’s that hillsides always win. My house sits on one.
Back in 2002, when my wife and I bought the place, it was basically the only property we could afford that had enough space for our kids and a small shop for my equipment. The house itself wasn’t anything special. An old cedar place built sometime in the late ‘7s, but the lot had character, steep character. Picture a slope that drops about 8 ft from my backyard down to the three homes behind me.
When we first moved in, the ground was soft clay and loose soil. And during the first heavy winter rain, the whole back section started slowly creeping downhill. Nothing dramatic at first, just little signs, cracks in the soil, a fence leaning a few inches more each week. But when you work in landscaping, you learn to read land like a mechanic listens to an engine.
And that hillside was whispering trouble. So, I did what any guy in my line of work would do. I built a retaining wall. It wasn’t fancy, not even close. I used old railroad ties I bought from a salvage yard outside town. Heavy, ugly timbers that smelled like creassot and history. The wall ran about 35 ft across the back of my yard and stood roughly 8 ft tall.
Not pretty, but solid. Behind it sat somewhere around 180 cubic yards of compacted soil. That wall wasn’t decoration. It was the only thing stopping the hill from visiting the neighbors below. Once it was finished, the difference was immediate. My yard leveled out nicely, and the three houses down the slope ended up with flat backyards and dry basement.
In fact, one of those neighbors, an older guy named Carl Jensen, used to joke that my wall was the best insurance policy he never had to pay for. For almost two decades, nobody complained about it. Not once. Carl and his wife lived directly behind us for years. sweet people, the kind who bring over zucchini bread and wave when they mow their lawn.
The other two houses changed owners once or twice over the years, but nobody ever had an issue with the wall. Most people understood something simple. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. Then last spring, everything changed. Carl sold his place and moved to Arizona after his wife passed. And about a month later, a moving truck showed up at the house behind mine.
outstepped a woman in designer sunglasses, crisp white sneakers that had clearly never touched mud, and the kind of confident walk that tells you she’s used to giving orders. Her name was Vanessa Caldwell. I didn’t know it yet, but Vanessa had just become the new president of our neighborhood HOA.
