It used to be that the brahmacaries would walk down through the valley between the ridge from the first farm of New Vrindaban (called Vrindaban) over to the ridge where the Palace is in order to work on it. Over in the morning, back in the evening. Every day for years. My guess is that 90% or more of the current residents of NV have never ever made that walk on the original route.

Part of the reason is that once the Palace manifest, it didn’t take a commitment to Srila Prabhupada’s vision to keep devotees hanging around — there was a tangible symbol anyone could see.

This brought in more money and a different demographic. Eventually, Kirtanananda built a road across the valley so those attached not only to the subtle and gross bodies, but also to their vehicle bodies, could make the trip.

The worst part of the trip was solved by a dam that created a lake on the run (West Virginiaese for a small stream) that starts across the street from my house, flows through Bahulaban and then runs towards Burches Run ex-Lake and eventually into Wheeling Creek (creek in WV = a small river). The road runs across the breastworks of the dam.

Normally there is only a small flow, but during storms or extended rainfalls, a run gets its name. All the water runs off the sides of the ridges and there is a surge that comes down the run. To accommodate this, there is a large catch in the lake about 10 feet across (3 m) . A smaller tube runs the risk of letting the lake get too full and washing out over the dam.

This catch had been clogged with limbs and branches, creating a potentially dangerous situation — if the dam failed because of overflow, all the impounded water would rush down the stream at once and would be a destrctive flood. So during recent road maintenance work, Varshana Swami removed a lot of the debris.

I was having lunch at the temple when Raghu walks in and announces there were 7 beavers in the catch; the clog was their handiwork. A bunch of us piled into his vehicle and went up to look. Here is what we saw:

beavers.jpg

I couldn’t spend too much time looking at beavers, as I had to get home and cover my fig. Even if it doesn’t give many figs, the plant itself is lush looking for this horticultural zone and the big leaves are good for covering things, like, ah, the side of my house which helps with cooling in the summer.

It had dipped enough below freezing the night before and I needed to get it covered before this latest cold front moved in for serious. You can see we are getting some accumulations of snow. Without protection , the fig will topkill in this environment and have to resprout from the roots.

wrapped-fig.jpg

Mission accomplished.