The House Well

     Two things would cause the sky to fall at our house when I was a kid.  You must be pretty close to the dinner table at twelve noon.  If you weren’t, you would hear about it.

     If there was no water in the kitchen or bathroom, everything came to a halt.  Diagnosing and healing the waterworks took priority.      

     The pasture well only malfunctioned during the warm months when the cattle were in the pasture.  The house well could go haywire anytime, summer or winter.  The pasture waterworks were fairly simple, needing no pressure other than gravity.  The house water was much more complicated.

    In the first place the well supplying water for the house is four or five hundred yards from the house, quite a distance to pump and pipe water using only wind power.  Second, some pressure was required to get water to flow from kitchen and bath faucets.

     Historically,the “tank house” supplied the pressure using gravity.  The tank would be housed in a tower of sorts, about twelve or fifteen feet above the ground.  The tower and tank had to be housed to keep water from freezing in the winter.  The windmill would raise the water and dump it into the top of the tank.  Usually the tank house would be built right beside the well and windmill.    

      A pipe ran from the bottom of the tank and had to be buried about three feet beneath ground level to prevent it from freezing.  That pipe would go underground into house basement or crawl space before resurfacing to supply house water.

     I don’t remember much of this but am relying on what I have heard.  Dad and Uncle Walter built our tank house (I do remember the tank house) by our well, but even with the tank full, the water would barely drip out of house faucets due to the distance the water had to flow.

     So they built skids and put them under the tank house and used a tractor to drag it up next to the house.  The tank was replumbed into the system.

     The problem now to be solved was how to get the water from the well to the distant tank house.  The answer was a second pump cylinder at the top of the well.  It forced the water through the pipe running to the tank house.  The windmill now did double duty.  It raised the water from the well on the rod’s upstroke.  The down stroke forced the water at the top of the well through the horizontal pipe to the tank house.

      Pumping water manually from this well was twice the work.  On the pasture well, pushing down on the pump handle raised the pump rod with the water.  Gravity helped push the rod back down so the upstroke wasn’t so hard.  But with the double cylinder set up, you had to pull the handle up to force the rod down because it was under pressure from all the water the upper cylinder was pushing to the tank house.

      It was a lot of work digging the trench for the pipe.  It had to be deep enough to be below frost level.  Some of it was done with tractor and plow, but a lot had to be done by hand.  It is steel pipe that has to be connected joint by joint.  I can only imagine the disappointment when the tank in its original location was filled by a day or two of windmill pumping and no water would run from any taps.

      The tank house successfully moved and installed still presented challenges, the main one being how to keep the standpipe, the one from tank to mother earth, from freezing.  Dad built a square 1”X12” housing for the standpipe and insulated it, but there were still below-zero mornings when we were “out of water”.  The pipe was frozen.

     One answer was to put a kerosene lantern at the base of the pipe chase.  The lantern kept the pipe from freezing, but it started a fire or two in the pipe chase.

      In my memory, I open the tank house door (which we often did in summer to get a cool drink directly from the hose bibb faucet coming out of the pipe chase) to the smell of charred wood and wet dirt.  As my eyes adjust to the darkness I can see the blackened 1”X12”’s and the remnants of burnt paper from the insulation.  A quart tin juice can with the top cut out provided a drinking vessel, or you could just get down on your knees and cock your head so the water ran from the faucet directly into your mouth.   When the faucet was cracked open, best for getting a drink without getting water in your nose, it made a sound like a cat hissing.  It tasted best that way, flavored with the mud and charred wood smells. 

     Another problem that probably led to the end of the tank house, the wooden tank always leaked.  Eventually the timbers that supported the tank rotted from the moisture.  There was always mud in the floorless tank house, anyway.  I can still smell the interior of the tank house even if I can’t describe it accurately.

     With the second cylinder in the well pump system, the house well had one more mechanism to maintain.  When the well stopped supplying water, sometimes it would be only the top cylinder that had to be repaired.  For that process there was the “well chain”.  It was a light chain with inch and a half round wooden shaft about twenty inches long and about the size of a stair hand rail wired to the last link of the chain.

     Dad straddled the wooden handle and let himself down into the top of the well opening.  One of us would hold the chain tight to help support him and keep the wooden “seat” from escaping his legs.  It was a tight fit.  The top of the well was a fifty-gallon drum he had to slide into to get to the cylinder.  The pump and pipe were somewhere in the center of the barrel, so he had to share the fifty-gallon drum with the hand pump base and the pipes. 

     He usually still had his hat on as he started down the well opening.  When his head got down to the pump base, he would realize he needed to take his hat off or lose it down the well.  One of us would take it from him and he would drop down below the pump until he hit the end of the chain, which would then become his seat as he commenced getting the cylinder loose.  He would have tied the upper end of the chain to a windmill leg.  He must have known where to knot the chain around the windmill leg.  I don’t ever remember him having to redo the chain length because he was too high or low to do his work.

     The upper cylinder was an inch and a half brass tube.  It was much smaller in diameter than the main pump cylinder.  Dad would unscrew the cylinder.  A piece of wire with a hook to catch the cylinder and tied to the pipes above it would hold the cylinder up out of the way while he removed and replaced the leathers.  I don’t remember for sure, but I think he had to uncouple the pump rod to do the job. 

     Once the new leathers were in place, the brass cylinder had to be forced over the new, stiff leathers and rethreaded to its base.  Dad would get the first leather started into the cylinder.   I remember trying to find a suitable way of driving the cylinder down onto the new leathers.  It had to be done carefully so as not to drop down the well whatever tool (pipe wrench?) was being used to beat on the top of the cylinder.  When both the leathers were all the way into the cylinder, then things would go easier.  Dad could force the brass down to the base, start the threads and tighten it with a pipe wrench.

      Dad would hand up the pipe wrenches and anything else he might have and begin crawling out of the well.  Again, the above-ground helper would assist by pulling up on the chain.  Once his hips were out, he could sit on the cement edge and gather his wits and his strength.

     If the lower cylinder leathers had to be replaced, someone had to ride the well chain down to disconnect the cross pipe that went horizontally to the tank house.  Nowadays, that connection about five or six feet down from the surface would be made with a flexible pipe of some kind that allows you to pull the well pipe up high enough to do the disconnecting above ground, but we never had that luxury.  Every well-pulling job began with someone descending beneath the manual pump assembly and breaking the union loose.  The chain hoist had to be assembled in the windmill tower and hooked to the hand pump to carry the weight of the pipe and pump.  The pipe union was hard enough to break loose with the weight of the pump off of it.  If the horizontal pipe was supporting the weight of the pump, you would never get the union loose.

      Likewise, when the well work was done and the pump and well pipe back in place, someone had to descend into the well’s mouth and reconnect the horizontal pipe to the well pipe.  Then the pump platform could be reassembled and the windmill returned to service.

      Since we never knew when the pump leathers would need replacing, we kept a supply on hand.  They were shelved in the “little room” in the shop.  The shop’s first incarnation was the Ramsey school house, the “little room” on one wall bearing bookshelves.

     One winter a few days after a well operation, the water began to taste and smell like Weed-Be-Gone.  (I never really tasted weed spray before that, so I really can’t make that comparison.)  A little detective work revealed that a jar of 2-4D on a shelf in the shop above the leathers had frozen hard enough to break.  Of course the liquid thawed and dripped down to the shelves below.  The leathers must have been saturated in the stuff.

     Had it been summer, we could have emptied the tank on the lawn or trees.  It wasn’t summer.  We didn’t.  We drank it, cooked with it, washed dishes in it, bathed in it, watered the violets with it, laundered clothes and flushed the stool with it. The cattle drank it, too.

    I don’t know how long the flavor lasted.  I guess we got used to it and didn’t notice as the bouquet gradually faded.  Did the flavored water have an adverse effect on our health?

     I remember one subzero breakdown.  I was too young to be out in the cold.  Dad built a fire near the well using scrap wood and two old rubber tires.  The “boys”, my two older brothers,  got to help.  The well had to be pulled.  They kept the idle tools near the fire in an attempt to keep them, and thus their hands, warm.  I don’t know how they dealt with the water that spilled every time they loosened a pipe joint.  I can only imagine the ice that formed making the well platform slippery and increasing the risk of falling down the well.  What I do remember was the old tires giving off a wonderful black smoke as they burned.  I watched from the house’s east window.

      I remember another winter well malfunction.  I was dressed and ready to take off for school.  Dad came into the yard from a trip to the windmill.  He said I would have to stay home from school and help him pull the pump.  For some reason Neighborly was there.  He told me, “Go on to school.  I’ll help with the well.”  I did, and he did.  Going to school was better than winter well work.

     Eventually, the tank house’s day came.  Dad planned a cistern.  The first step was to dig out a hole exactly the size of the tank house’s inside dimensions.  We were inveterate cave diggers, so digging a hole that size was right up our alley.  The dirt was wet from all the years of drips and the water that escaped from the spigot and didn’t get drunk or captured in a jug or pale.  In places it was muddy, but after getting down a foot or so, it was okay.

     I wasn’t much help after the first layer or two.  I couldn’t throw the dirt out of the tank house door.  It got dug.  Dad made forms out of old one-inch lumber.  He bought water proof cement.  We hauled loads of gravel from the pasture creek.  We put the auger engine on the cement mixer and we ran concrete.

       We also dug a pit just to the north to house a new electric pump with forty gallon pressure tank.  It was also formed and cemented, but not water proof cement.  Nate Einertson installed the new pump and we were ready to switch from gravity flow pressure to electric powered pressure.

     We didn’t use any rebar when we ran the cement for the cistern.  We used the cistern for quite a few years, but it was always problematic.  It leaked.  One day we would have a cistern full of water.  A few hours later the pump would be sucking air.  I couldn’t count all the times we drained the cistern, mopped it out and patched cracks.  It was nice to have the good pressure we never had with the tank house.  But it was less reliable than the old tank house system in a way.  Every time we had to repair the cistern, we would be without water for at least a day while we did the work, and then allowed the patchwork to set up before turning the windmill loose to fill the cistern again.

      Enter Francis “Babe” Eastwood into the picture.  He convinced the folks to drill a new well, install a submersible pump and pump directly into a new pressure tank, eliminating the cistern.  So they drilled a new well just a few feet north of the old well.  The submersible pump eliminated the windmill, the old pump system and the pressure pump in the pit next door. 

     It worked pretty well when the pressure tank was full.  But when Mom washed clothes, the tank would get low and the submersible pump pumping all that way through the ¾” pipe couldn’t begin to keep up, not to mention when the lawn needed watered.  Eastwood was consulted again. 

     Sometime in the late sixties or early seventies, a precast concrete cistern was dug in east of the old cistern that now housed the pressure tank.  A pressure pump was again a necessity.  It was placed in the old cistern with the new pressure tank.  That system remains in service.  We are on the second submersible pump, the original one destroyed by a lightning bolt that hit the garage and entered the farm electrical system via the garage door openers. 

      We are on the third pressure pump, one having frozen and fracturing the pump casting during a colder-than usual winter.  Another burned out a bearing in the motor.

      To run the submersible pump, we had to trench in three heavy cables from the farmyard to the well.  The first cables were aluminum.  The aluminum proved to be unreliable.  In the ‘90’s, we laid copper cables in PVC pipe to help protect the wires from vermin and weather.  Take away the lightning strike and we are fairly trouble free.

     An advantage of having Eastwood as our well man was he was, and now his sons are, there when you need them.  One 4^th of July, I mowed too close to the cistern and hit a surface pipe that connected two electrical sensors that control the well pump.  When I saw what I had done, I immediately called Eastwood, forgetting it was a holiday.  He came out early that afternoon and undid my damage.

     No one has had to go down into a well for forty years.  Both wells are now drilled wells.  When we are out of water, we just call Eastwood. 

               

    

            

    

   

   

      

       

The Pasture Well

     Harvest or subzero weather.

    That’s when the well would quit working.  Water on the dry old plains presents a difficulty that the natives consider part of the cost of living there.

     Some farm water systems rely on rainfall and runoff capture systems to keep a cistern or storage tank supplied with water.  Rain and snow on the plains are not reliable enough sources for domestic water supply. 

    Right after erecting some kind of shelter, the early homesteaders would have to dig a well.  On our homestead there are three hand dug wells.  The total comes to five counting two on Frank Horak’s homestead.  There are probably more that were “dry holes” that got covered up soon after they were dug. None of the hand dug wells are in use anymore. 

     Water “witches” were in high demand in those “olden days.”  The hand dug wells in our area are 80 to 90 feet deep.  It would be heartbreaking to spend the time to dig down 90 feet and hit bedrock but no water.  The water witch would find the right place to dig.  Even with that talented person’s help, many holes were dry.  Many more wells furnished water for a while and then “dried up.”  Sch was the case for two of the three wells on the home place.

     All our hand dug wells had some kind of cement works on the surface to provide a base for a pump and to keep the top of the well from eroding or caving in.  The well that supplied our water for years has plastered walls extending from the water up to about four feet below the surface.  A fifty gallon drum with the ends cut out and surrounded by cement provides the surface platform for the well cover and the pump.          

      The traditional windlass with bucket and rope was probably used in the olden days but was impracticable with the depths of the wells.   Add the fact that our domestic well is four or five hundred yards away from the house and the impracticality is magnified.  Hand pumps and windmills to the rescue. 

      As long as I can remember, we had two windmills to supply domestic and livestock water.  The “pasture” windmill and pump system was fairly simple.  The windmill wheel turned a crankshaft that raised and lowered the pump rod as the crankshaft went around and around.  The pump rod went through a pipe to the bottom of the well.  At the bottom of the pipe was the cylinder.

     The cylinder was the clever device that made the pump work.  It was brass, about two feet long and two to three inches in diameter.  On the pump rod within the cylinder were two to four cupped leather washers that fit tightly against the cylinder walls.  They provided the suction or lift.  A valve on the very end of the rod and inside the “leathers” opened as the pump rod went down, allowing water to enter the cylinder.  As the rod started back up, the weight of the water closed the valve and the water went up with the rise of the rod. Another valve inside the leathers above the lower valve worked in the opposite way of its counterpart.  It closed as the rod went down, not letting water run back down into the well, and opened as the rod rose to let the water go up the pipe.

     When the water rose to the surface, it came through an old-fashioned hand pump assembly.  It poured out the pump body’s spout.  A cup with a bail handle and a pipe threaded into its outlet hung on the pump’s spout.  The pipe took the water to the stock tank.   

     It all worked very well when the wind blew and the leathers were in good shape.  Rarely, but once in a while, the wind would not blow for two or three days in a row.  Then we hitched the pump handle up to the pump rod and each took our turn at pushing up and down on the handle until there as enough water for the cattle.

      Of course the leathers wore out and no longer lifted the water.  Silt or sand in the water would wear the leathers out pretty quickly.  Occasionally, the well casing, the porous ring in the bottom of the well where the pipe went, had to be cleaned out to get rid of sand and once in a while, a dead animal.  (Sometimes the well platform developed a hole or opening and a rabbit, mouse, or snake would find its way into the well.)

      That meant someone had to go down into the well.  That was always Dad until a couple of my brothers grew big enough for the job.  (My claustrophobia prevented me from ever taking on the job.)

      First, the pump had to be “pulled”.  That involved raising the pipe out of the well.  A chain hoist fastened to an iron bar across the top of the windmill tower started the procedure.  We raised the hand pump portion up high enough to get to the first “joint” or coupling in the pipe.  A pipe “dog” held the pipe, keeping it from dropping back into the well.  Two pipe wrenches, one on the pipe coupling and one on the pipe above the coupling, turned the top section of pipe out of the coupling.  “Lefty Loosey” took some strength to get the pipes apart.  Then the top section of pipe, including the cast iron hand pump, had to be raised enough to locate the coupling in the pump rod inside the pipe.  That coupling had to be taken apart, too.  Then the hand pump and top section of pipe could be let down out of the way.

     Now the remaining pipe could be lifted by two guys with pipe wrenches.  It was still heavy because the pipe was filled with water if the valve in the cylinder was doing its job.  The pipe dog had a movable jaw that went up and down.  You put your pipe wrenches on the pipe just above the jaws of the pipe dog.  When you lifted the pipe, the dog jaw would swing up and let the pipe rise.  When you lifted the pipe as high as you could, you let the pipe slide back down a bit.  The dog jaw would swing down and clamp the pipe, not letting the pipe go down any farther.    Stoop over while sliding the pipe wrenches down the pipe to get another “bite” on the pipe just above the pipe dog.  Lift, let pipe back an inch until the dog “bites”.  Repeat action a half dozen times and the 21’ section of pipe would be sticking up through the tower and another coupling would work its way through the pipe dog jaws. 

      This time when you loosen the pipe from the coupling, you have to be careful.  There’s water in that 21’ of pipe.  When the threads are loosened enough, the water with 21 feet of head pressure comes squirting out.  That wasn’t terribly uncomfortable in the summer time, but when it was winter and cold, it was dangerous.  Not only did you get a chilling bath, but ice formed under foot around the well mouth.  Yikes!    

     When the water was all drained out, separate the pipe and hold it suspended while you uncouple the pump rod.  Holding the pump rod, you took the base of the pipe to a corner of the tower and stood it out of the way.  It was a two man job for sure.

     The last section of pipe held the cylinder.  It had to be taken apart and the leathers replaced.  Taking the cylinder apart was a bit tricky.  The cylinder was brass and care had to be taken not to dent or crush the cylinder in any way or its effectiveness as a water lifter would be impaired. 

     Once the pipe was removed it was time to descend into the well.  We would rig two pulleys in the windmill tower, one attached to a tower leg at the bottom of the tower, and one attached to the crow bar at the top of the tower, the same one used to support the chain hoist that raised the first section of pipe.

      We would thread a thick rope (the “well” rope used to pull the old spruce tree in the right direction) through the pulleys.  At the end of the rope coming down from the top pulley, Dad would form a loop or two in the rope.  The main loop was big enough for him to put his leg through and slide up to his crotch.  That would be the saddle he would ride to the bottom of the well and back to the surface when his job was done.

    Another loop might hold a bucket and some sort of shovel that he would need to clean out the well casing once he got down there.  From the top pulley the rope went through the bottom pulley which directed the rope horizontally beneath the tower to the tractor front axle.

    The other end of the rope was tied securely to the tractor axle.  Back the tractor up till all the slack was out of the rope.  Dad would mount his “saddle”, the tractor would back a little further until Dad was suspended over the well mouth.  The tractor had to be shifted from reverse to first gear low range.  Dad would be swinging back and forth over the well while the shifting took place. 

     Then as slow as the tractor would go forward, the descent started.  Even as slow as the tractor was going, Dad would yell to slow down, the well walls were racing past him, and he would be banging against the walls one side then the other.  With leather gloves, one person could slow his descent by grabbing the rope, but it would create some slack in the rope between the tower and the tractor.

     When Dad reached the bottom of the well, he would crawl out of the rope and begin the job of cleaning out the well casing.  He had created a tool that would allow him to stand on the well casing and not in the water.  The digging part was an old license plate folded into a “U” and nailed to a 1”X6”.  The wood served as the back of the scoop and connected to a wooden handle.  He would shovel the sand and silt into the bucket.  When the bucket was full, we would pull it up and empty it.

     Raising and lowering the bucket was touchy business.  You had to avoid the sides of the well and be careful not to kick anything down the well.  The smallest pebble that fell into the well would elicit yells from Dad.  He equated getting hit with a pebble to being shot with a BB gun or getting hit by a hail stone.  By the time it fell the 70 to 90 feet, it was going pretty fast.

      Getting the full bucket out of the well without kicking anything into the well and without spilling anything could be tricky.  Once the bucket was empty, the same care must be taken to get the bucket back into the well and back down to Dad.

     Dad didn’t have a miner’s lamp for his head.  Light was provided by holding a mirror in the sunlight and reflecting the beam into the well.  When the sunlight reflected from the water back into your eyes, you had the mirror held right.  It was a job I did as a kid.  It was exciting for a few minutes, but it got boring pretty quickly to lie beside the well without moving so as not to cause anything to fall into the well and hold the light steady.       

     Well work often involved the entire family when it was warm weather.  Our well work would have sent OSHA reaching for the Kaopectate, had they been around then, with the open well, tools lying around, pulleys bailing-wired to poles and bars, little kids running around.

     One time Grandma T was on hand when we did the pasture well.  She was sitting on the running board of the old Ford pickup.  I don’t remember what brought up the saying, but apparently we had overcome some difficult problem.  She said, “It’s all perseverance and (pause) I don’t like to say that other thing your Grandad used to say.”

    My curiosity was piqued.  But nobody would tell me the rest of the saying.  It was a while before I learned “the rest of the story”—“It’s all perseverance and three-in-one oil.”  This from the same Grandad who once in a while would say at breakfast, “Pretty good biscuits, Ma.  Musta’ forgot to wash your hands this morning.” 

    Eventually Dad would put the shovel in the bucket and wire the handle to the rope and that would be the last bucketful.  We would remove the bucket and shovel and send the rope down empty.  Dad would step into the loop, the tractor would back up slowly and up he would come.

     Then the pipe and rod had to be reassembled.  The cylinder complete with new leathers went in first, the pipe dog slid over the pipe above the cylinder.  One at a time the pipe sections with the rod inside was carried over to the coupling sticking out of the pipe dog’s jaws.  One person had to hold up the pipe while the rod was reconnected and tightened securely.

      Then you threaded the 21’ of pipe into the coupling.  In order for the threads to connect correctly, the pipe had to be in line with the pipe in the dog.  That could be a challenge with the pipe banging around in the top of the tower and the windmill head.  The pipe also had to be tightened securely.

     Lowering the reconnected length of pipe took a different procedure than raising it.  The pipe dog didn’t like letting the pipe down.  After all, not letting the pipe down was its job.  There was a handle on the movable jaw.  It was like a foot pedal.  To let the pipe down, both guys picked up on the pipe wrenches, now chest high, to loosen the dog’s grip on the pipe, and one man had to step on the pedal to hold the jaw open as the pipe went down.

     The first hitch required a wide-open jaw to allow the coupling to clear the jaws.  When the pipe wrenches neared the pipe dog, the guy holding the pipe jaw open had to step off the pedal and allow the dog to clamp the pipe and hold it while the wrenches were repositioned chest high for another hitch.  Five or six more hitches would get the pipe section down to the coupling and time to bring over another section of pipe.

     There were some advantages to lowering the pipe.  It wasn’t full of water as it was coming up, so it wasn’t as heavy.  Plus you weren’t getting wet at every joint. 

     The last section with the hand pump would go back up.  The heavy chain hoist, removed for the well-cleaning operation, had to be carried back up into the tower and hooked to the crowbar.  When the last section was hooked up, the pipe dog came off the platform and the pump lowered with the chain hoist.  The wood platform was fitted around the pipe and the pump lowered to the base.  The platform consisted of 2”X12”’s plus a one-inch board here and there to get the pump the right height and to hold all the 2”X12”s together.

    It was time turn on the windmill to see if everything worked right.  While the pump was going up and down with the wind, gather and load up all the tools and equipment.  By the time that was done the water should be flowing into the stock tank.  All was well for the time being.  We could get back to harvesting wheat.

    Next, the “house” well

The Old Blue Spruce

    There it stood, sheltering the northwest corner of the house, separating the garage from the house, showering the lawn with fire-starting pine cones, shading the west window from hot afternoon suns. 

      For a while it even provided Christmas trees for the farm on the occasions when one was needed.  I would cut off a branch that was rubbing the house wall or roof, make a stand for it, and wrap it with lights.  It was satisfactory for three of us, providing the symbol, color and especially the smell of Christmas.  One of us found such “trees” tawdry, even referring to one as a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.  Oh well.

    But those days are gone.  It has all come down to this:

Top and bottom.

    The transition didn’t happen overnight.  It went like this.

     One March day in 2014, I trimmed branches and fastened a chain around the trunk over half way up. 

     Other priorities emerged.  Finally, January of 2015, the day came. 

     The tree trunk, like most trees on the exposed plane, leaned to the east trained up by the prevailing west winds. 

      I didn’t trust my lumberjack skills to keep the tree from falling either to the garage or the house.  Thus the chain, and the “well” rope.

  

   I enlisted Neighborly to help.  His enthusiasm for something to do in January was tempered somewhat by upcoming surgery on his right knee.  His mobility was restricted, but he grabbed the chainsaw and whacked the top half of the initial wedge out.  Then he manned the Dakota while I finished the cut.

     The sadness of the day was overshadowed by the excitement of the potential danger.  The tree safely down (safely unless you were the unfortunate cedar bush under the spruce trunk), reflection replaced adrenalin.  While the tree will be sorely missed, it was a problem. 

     The spruce had an older sibling on the southwest corner of the house.  One calm summer Sunday afternoon in 1983, a gusting wind blew up suddenly out of the west and snapped the trunk of the southwest spruce.  Fortunately, it fell between the house and the juniper hedge and did little damage.

 1983 Photograph 

    After that event, always in the back of the mind, would another wind blow (is the Pope Catholic?—this is Eastern Colorado)?  Would the northwest tree go gently into that narrow gulch between garage and house?  The question is now moot.

      What once kept the house cool in the summer now heats it this winter.

    Neighborly counted 60 rings on the stump.  That would be about right.   I would have been about ten when we successfully planted it.

    The tree will be sorely missed.  Rest in peace old spruce.

A Snake in the Tarp

     “Ha, ha, ha!  Just like in As I Lay Dying.”

     We were stopped on Evans Street in the midst of the University of Denver Campus.  It was a little after noon. The street was narrow, no parking on either side, the traffic lanes running right next to the sidewalk.  Front line pedestrians stood literally within a foot of the trailer we were pulling.  We all were waiting for the traffic light to change.

     The day began before 6 a.m.  It was pick-up-kitchen-cabinets day.  The new cabinets were in Denver.  We were in Kansas.  It was cloudy and threatened rain.  We had borrowed a ¾ ton pickup and a 20 foot trailer.  I grabbed the three or four tarps from the garage and threw them into the back of the pickup.  We were going to need the tarps.

      One of the tarps smelled funny.  I suspected a dead rodent so I partially unfolded and shook out the tarp.  In the early morning darkness, I couldn’t see if anything fell out or not.  I refolded and tossed the tarp with its fellows in the back of the pickup. 

     Five hours later we were parked in front of the cabinet shop somewhere near South Santa Fe.  The forklift operator had loaded three or four cabinets onto the trailer when the rain drops began to fall.

     I grabbed the tarps and began covering cabinets.  I flipped the big tarp out on the driveway as you would spread a clean sheet on a bed.  I jerked the edge of the tarp above my head, then immediately back down below my waist as I stepped back and pulled.   The last fold of the tarp spread across the cement, and out tumbled the remnants of a snake about 24 to 30 inches long. 

     Skeleton and some skin were about all that was left of the poor creature.  The rest of him stuck in a two foot smear on the tarp.

    The Goodwife, the salesman, I, we all stepped back from the carcass.  I was torn.  Clean up the mess I had made on the cabinet shop’s driveway to hide my embarrassment?  The thousands of dollars of cabinets getting wet on the trailer won out.  I clambered over the trailer pulling the odiferous tarp, stained side up, over the new cabinets.  No one helped me.

     The salesman finally brought out a dust pan, one with a handle so you don’t have to stoop to collect the trash, and a short broom.  He scooped up the snake remnants.  He was going to take them to a trash can inside the shop.  I suggested that the shop crew wouldn’t care for the perfumery.  He should dump it into the neighbor’s dumpster a few yards away.  He compromised by dumping it into the shop’s outside dumpster. 

       Almost immediately the story inflated.  The cabinet guys said it was a rattlesnake.  I tried to belay that.  If it were a rattlesnake, the rattles would still be on the tail.They would not have decomposed, I told them.  It wasn’t a rattlesnake.  But it was a snake.

        Having found a place on the trailer for all the cabinets and the trim pieces, we started on our return journey.  The tarps I had brought barely covered the cabinets.  We pulled into a Home Depot nearby.  I parked the truck on the northern outskirts of the parking lot so I wouldn’t have to back up.  The Goodwife ran into the store to buy tarps and straps while I adjusted the load and the tarps and made ready to add the new covers to the load. 

     “Oh my gosh!” she said as she wheeled up the new tarps and straps in the shopping cart.  “I could smell that thing when I stepped out the door!”  The door was several yards downwind from where I had parked.

     “It will wear off in the wind and rain when we get going,” I said.

     “It better not make my new cabinets smell,” she warned.

     “It won’t,” I tried to assure her.

     Part of the deal of borrowing the pickup-trailer combo was that we would pick up and haul a roll of carpet back to Kansas.  The carpet had been delivered to our daughter’s house.  To get there we went east on Evans. 

     It was noon hour.  There were lots of pedestrians out.  There was traffic.  When we stopped for the red light, we barely cleared the intersection behind us.  The crosswalk was partially blocked by the trailer.  The wind blew from the north.  The pedestrians were a captive audience as they waited to cross the street. 

    I checked the right mirror.  I couldn’t see anybody throwing up or people covering their noses.  They had to be wondering what kind of cargo was born by the trailer.  I was unable to help them.  I couldn’t move until the light changed and the traffic cleared.  Nothing to do but laugh.       

             

      In As I Lay Dying Addie, the “I” in the title, extracts a promise that her family will bury her in town in a proper cemetery rather than in the Mississippi boondocks where she spent her life.  Encountering many a mishap, the husband, four sons and one daughter take over a week to make the trip to town with the decomposing body in the homemade coffin.  A hovering handful of buzzards chart their course from above.  Fellow travelers and bystanders press handkerchiefs to their noses and back away when they encounter the wagon bearing the coffin and the family members.

      It was a long day.  Having loaded the carpet, we were ready to head for Kansas.  It took several back and forths to get the trailer and pickup turned around in the residential dead end street.  We negotiated stops for food and fuel.  It rained.  We made a few stops to check our precious load and adjust tarps.  Some of the cabinets got a little wet caused by the splash from the trailer wheels.  I couldn’t protect the cabinets from that.

       However much it rained or splashed, the dead-snake smell never went away.

     We moved all the cabinets from the trailer into the garage that night after we got home.  We uncrated and checked for damage, dried off those that got wet.  It was a long day.

    I took advantage of the three-day rain.  I spread the odiferous tarp out on a grassy slope.  I mixed up an ammonia solution and scraped, mopped and brushed the tarp.  It was clean, but it still stunk.  I tried a bleach solution.  I supplemented the rainy weather with garden hose and nozzle.  It all helped.

      Several days draped over the clothes line in the sun helped.  But nothing completely removed the odor.  Recently, I spread that tarp over tomato plants to protect them from frost.  Sure enough, as I unfolded the tarp, that snake’s essence wafted up my nostrils to remind me of its torturous death in my arid summer garage.