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.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

Search This Blog