There aren't many days throughout the course of a year in all seasons when the weather presents enough of a constraint to shut us out of our usual daily ravine walk, but yesterday certainly qualified. After yet another night of rolling thunderstorms, rain continued relentlessly all through the daylight hours. We never knew when a thunderstorm might strike, and it isn't fun being stuck in the forest during a thunderstorm. Our little dogs become drenched even if we have taken along raincoats for them. And yesterday's high nudged up only to 17-C degrees.

In fact, in the afternoon we decided to turn the gas fireplace on to take the chill out of the house a bit. We've never before had to do that at this time of year, the beginning of summer. At dinnertime there were a few episodes of the house shaking slightly. We're in an earthquake-prone zone, but it wasn't that. Despite the rain, construction engineers who normally give those rainy days a pass, were hard at work. Two large building cranes had been moved behind the three houses on the street backing onto the ravine where the hill above the ravine on which they were constructed, leading down into the ravine, had slumped.

They're still there. A month ago a drilling rig was brought in to test core samples and determine how deep they'd have to go to reach bedrock. The result of that is now taking place. Iron rods in a fence-like shape are being placed deep into the forest floor at the hilltop level which has in any event been partially levelled in that particular area for months by bulldozers reducing the slope and lining the bottom half with heavy rocks. Earlier a forestry company had come in to harvest and haul off the trees that remained on the slope.

That we could feel the house trembling at our distance from the site, speaks volumes about the difficulty and the depths to which the engineers have devised a method whereby they feel the threatened homes can be saved and the homeowners (one middle-aged couple whose adult children have since moved out on their own, another elderly couple one of whom is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and a younger family with two children) who were forced to evacuate can finally move back into them.

The incessant spring rains that had caused the series of hillside slumps threatening those homes back in April have never relented in volume and constancy since then. All last night the rain continued to drench the environment, interspersed with the sound and fury of thunderstorms. And now, the rain continues as well. The two cranes remain in place, they're being worked and we can only hope that the prodigious effort that has gone into preserving the area will indeed work.