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Pioneers and Pressure Pumps

Ages and eons ago, I used to dread my Grandfather's suggestion that I go pump water for the cows and horses.  The pump stood on a waist-high cover over a shallow well not far from a peat bog, so a simple hand pump did the job.

No, a simple grandson did the job.  The water ran down a short wooden chute to a long watering trough, carved from a big log.  On a hot day, a ring of cows and horses can drink faster than a boy can pump water, and the rule was that you never quit until the animals were satisfied and the trough was full.

At our log house, near Decorah, the water supply is a buried, concrete water cistern up on the hillside, filled with water hauled from the Fire Station in town, which runs down to the log house.  Gravity does all the pumping.  That's the easy part.

I used to hire a milk truck driver to bring water to the cistern, but now all the milk trucks are the size of oil tankers, so I have to haul the water myself, perhaps once a year.  It takes lots of trips to fill a deep cistern, 325 gallons at a time.  Even so, a tankful of water weighs about 2,700 pounds, and sloshing down a dirt road with more than a ton of water at ebb tide is vibratory, celebratory, and adventuresome.

The cistern rarely runs dry, but it did this winter, probably because I skipped filling it last summer.  We don't even drink the water, anymore, but we use it for cooking and washing up.  To run out of water, even for those non-threatening purposes, is sobering.  In many parts of the world, especially in Africa where all of us began this adventure, there are, still, millions of people who walk each day, as I drove, to find and bring water home.  Not to find it, and not to bring it home, is to live about four days from death.

My job was easy.  I was four minutes from ten neighbor's water.  I am twenty minutes from the Fire Station in town, if I drive lazily and listen to the NPR.

We are no pioneers, we log house owners, next to town.  We have gravity on our side, and the cows have a pressure pump.

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