Fountain man

WASILLA — Part engineer, part poet and ever the aquaphile, Bill Stokes headed into retirement after 30 years of designing water systems at the jail at Goose Creek with a bucketful of bucket list projects.

Among the projects he was most looking forward to was to build an altogether unique water fountain outside his Wasilla-area home, a house drenched in bright blue that he calls the “Periwinkle Palace.”

A year ago, those hopes were nearly shattered when he was involved in a car accident that caused him a category 2 concussion with brain damage, loss of some motor functions and some short-term memory loss.

At 69, living in his Periwinkle Palace, the odds were stacked against the fountain seeing completion.

“For me, that was the impetus,” Stokes said. “I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna do it myself.”

Using an old Jacuzzi tub for a base, Stokes handled all of the plumbing and electric work himself, and buttressed it with a wall of blocks about 65 pounds each.

It took Stokes more than two months to complete the project, and when he first turned it on earlier this month, it did something that surprised him.

By fashioning the nozzle at the bottom of the tub, and controlling water pressure from a circuit box against the wall of his house, Stokes is able to create a plume of water that rises in more or less a corkscrew fashion. This allows the water stream to rise and fall in a vertically perfect manner, something Stokes says he knows of nowhere else in the world of fountains.

“From all the tweaking I did, the plume is not round at all,” Stokes said, sitting on the bench he placed next to it alongside his numerous medications. “It’s falling back on itself, as it falls down it looks like glass.”

The greatest value of this style of water flow, Stokes said, is when it becomes a looking glass into the sky.

“It picks up the color of the sky — I wasn’t expecting that,” he said. “Whatever the color of the sky is, the water acts as a mirror and the white inside of it is the reflectors — it literally goes blue or red or pink.”

Stokes said he couldn’t find another example of this sort of fountain behavior, even in literature about developments in fountains. But the point of the project wasn’t so much to invent something new as it was to create a serene haven in the midst of busy modern life. He hopes to share his little slice of heaven with the people of the Wasilla-Palmer area.

“A lot of people go places, but they don’t have a place to go,” he said. “What I was looking for was, not a mass amount of people, but people who wanted some quiet time and mind their manners… Maybe a 10 minute break from the world, a half-hour break from the world.”

Stokes said anyone who’d like to enjoy his fountain creation may e-mail him at oneenvironment@gci.net.

“What I’m looking for is people to share this with,” Stokes said. “I lost my wife in 2010 and the quiet bothered me. I wished I had someplace like this to go and just sit and think…. They don’t have to say a word to anybody, just take it in. Quiet time is hard to find.”

But the fountain isn’t the only “Field of Dreams” construct at the Periwinkle Palace. In the backyard, there sits a treehouse that isn’t any ordinary treehouse.

Armor-plated, it’s built to sustain winds well over 100 mph, and in the level below there hangs a chandelier that Stokes has wired to actually light up. He built it about 15 years ago for his grandchildren to play on, but it’s capable of hosting whole families with tent space above and a fire pit below.

“As you find out as you get older, the sound of children’s laughter is something you really look for — it gets quiet, lonely,” said Stokes, who’s authored 460 poems, which he’s trying to get published as part of another bucket list entry. “I do a lot of my poetry writing up there.”

The next project to scratch from Stokes’ bucket list is a fishing device that would allow an angler to cast more than 1,000 feet from shore.

That, he constructed for less than $150, and the fountain, he said, cost him less than $700 and the science behind all of his creations he’s pleased to share with anyone who cares to visit.

“Water is my world and I know how to do structures,” said Stokes, who remarried four years ago. “My wife wanted those (fountains), but I don’t want to build another one — it’s really hard on me. If somebody’s interested in how, I’ll share everything I did.”