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.  

3-21-70

     “That’s only the second mistake I’ve ever made in my life.”

     It was my stock response when the kids in class delightedly pointed out a mistake I had made either on a handout or something I had chalked on the board.

     “What was the first one?” 

       I removed the plain silver band from my left ring finger, held it up to the light and read the inscription, “3-21-70.”  They laughed.  I laughed.  But down the hall, someone was not laughing.

     My classroom wasn’t Las Vegas.  What happened there didn’t stay there, I found out.

     One of the few in-services that I remember was a standup comedian who entertained the faculty from a dozen or more schools at a “Collaborative In-Service”.  Many of the schools in the area combined their resources and hired a high-powered consultant to come enhance our abilities to educate.  One time the great guru Madeline Hunter spent six hours sharing with us strategies for dignifying incorrect answers that students might give in the course of a class discussion.

     The standup comedian humorously stereotyped the various faculty members in the typical school.  I remember two of his descriptions, the shop teacher who was on the bottom rung of the faculty social ladder, who may not have dressed very well to come to work, for you never saw his “school” clothes because he always wore white coveralls to class.

     On the other end of the spectrum was the home-ec teacher.  She would always be so well coiffured and dressed that she resembled an iced cupcake or an ice cream cone.  Like a small boy who can’t resist sampling the icing, you wanted to leave a small imperfection on the home-ec teacher’s appearance.  She was the purveyor of good manners, the one whose frown let you know you had trespassed with some form of bad taste.

     It was funny because the stereotype was so accurate.  I don’t remember what he said about English teachers, or math, science, or social studies teachers, either, for that matter.  But I had firsthand knowledge of that frown, a frown that went around corners and up the stairs. 

     One time after I made my “second mistake” comment, the girls in the class chortled and one gleefully informed me that Mrs. **** said that was a very poor attitude to have towards marriage.  It seems in home-ec class they were doing a unit on marriage and family.  Something that came up in class prompted the girls to share with Mrs. **** my referring to my wedding ring to reveal my “first mistake.”  Mrs. **** did not hesitate to inform her class that viewing marriage as a mistake was certainly not a correct attitude, especially if one wished to succeed in marriage.

   I was amused and annoyed.  My gut reaction was to say my attitude towards marriage really wasn’t any of Mrs. ****’s business.  By some stroke of good luck, I managed to stifle my natural reaction.  Instead, I said something like, “Mrs. **** said that, did she?”

     The girls assured me that she had indeed emphatically stated that.  They leaned forward on the edge of their seats, waiting eagerly for me to react.  I saw they were trying to start a war between faculty members.  I saw a never-ending string of pointed comments between me and Mrs. **** ferried by the sophomore girls.  I wanted nothing to do with that, so I stifled myself.

     That incident fairly well ended my wedding ring act to detract attention from my grammatical errors.  Mrs. **** won that battle pretty easily.  I soon forgot the whole thing and probably would not have remembered it.

      But then the 21^st of March really did roll around. 

     At every faculty meeting, we were reminded to get into the hall as soon as we could after the dismissal bell chimed at the end of each class period.  Most of the discipline problems the principal had to handle occurred in the three minutes between classes when every student was in the hallway.  That’s when students sniped at each other and occasionally a fight broke out or someone was reduced to tears by an insult.   Faculty presence prevented many of those problems.

     I was standing by my door as usual between second and third hours.  I never noticed that the girls spirited a large bundle past me into my classroom.  Had they set up a decoy to distract me?  No matter.  They got past me without my notice.

     When the bell rang to start class, I entered the room to find on my desk, a rectangular cake, chocolate icing, with the inscription, “Happy Anniversary Mr. Ottem” in contrasting colored icing.   

    I was surprised and flattered.   I told them I was flattered that they had remembered my anniversary.  The girls were delighted. I avoided asking if they had treated Mrs. **** on her anniversary.  I skirted the reason why they remembered that day, too.  Make love, not war. 

      Of course, the students wanted to dig right in, but disciplinarian me insisted that we finish our work first and spoil our lunch second by enjoying the cake at the end of the hour, which we did.  We carefully cleaned up after the feast, for in those days it was against the rules to have refreshments in the classrooms.  No sense starting a war with the janitor.

Book Test Cheater

     There was a knock at the door.  Book in hand, I moved to the door and opened it.   I don’t remember what I was trying to explain to the class, but room, students, everything became wall paper.

     Outside my door in the hallway, students talked while they rummaged in their lockers.  It was game day and those in the hallway were released early from class.  They were supposed to be quiet since classes were being held in the rooms up and down the hallway.

     Early-release game day meant that the game was out of town. Athletes had to leave during afternoon classes in order to get to the game on time.  They also dressed up on game day.

     I saw the neatly curled and arranged hair as she, head bowed, looked down at her polished dress shoes that almost touched as she stood there.  Her hands at her waist worried a wrinkled handkerchief.  Her knees, just visible below the hem of her skirt, alternated back and forth. 

     “Mr. Ottem, can I talk to you?”  I stepped far enough into the hallway to close the door, then backed until my heels nearly touched the door.  Almost without pause she continued. 

     “I cheated on a book test today.  I’m sorry.  It won’t ever happen again.”  The words poured out rapidly without hesitation.  Briefly she glanced up at me as she spoke, then back down again.  In the brief glance I saw not tears, but the pain and anguish that filled the eyes.

     At the end of her speech, she glanced up and waited briefly for me to speak.  I could say nothing. I had no words.  No clichés from previous experiences jumped to mind.  I was totally taken by surprise.   I smiled stupidly.  At least that kept my mouth from dropping open. 

     Then head still bowed, she abruptly turned and wove her way amidst her fellow students.  I watched her until she was out of sight around the hallway corner. 

     I didn’t have the luxury to stand in the hallway and reflect on what happened.  Even if I had come up with a proper reaction, I couldn’t follow her down the hall to talk to her.  There was the class I was trying to teach, the lesson to be completed.  The entire experience had to be tucked away for later rumination.

     Ruminate was all I ever did.  I had already graded the tests.  I knew she had failed it.  It was the first book test that I gave where I had changed the answer sequence from the original test.  It went to her class because it was the one I suspected had the most cheaters.  The trap worked.  About half of the class had gotten a zero on the 30-question test.

      As soon as I could, I revisited her answer sheet.  She didn’t get a zero on it.  She had erased some of the first few answers and replaced the wrong answers with correct ones.  I knew she had read some of the book, enough to know that the “cheat” answers were not correct. 

      What should I do?  Punish her because she had had the integrity to confess her crime?  Try to find out from her who was at the bottom of the scam?

     She had punished herself enough.  Being a cop was a part of teaching I disliked.  I had temporarily stopped yet another attempt to work the system. Would it do any good to find out who was the instigator? 

     Something else occurred to me.  I had always thought of her as a good person.  That was one reason her confession left me speechless.  But I didn’t respect her less because she cheated.  I respected her more. Because of the incident, I saw the depth of her honesty and self-respect.  She was a person who had set high standards for herself and would probably live up to them. She had the fortitude to face the person she had offended and admit her wrongdoing.  She was a good person, a person worth knowing.

       So I did nothing.  Way led onto way.  The year came to an end.  She did not take A-P English, the only class I taught for seniors.  She graduated and went to a junior college. 

      Since then I have met her a couple of times.  She acknowledged my greeting, but I had the impression that she really would prefer not to talk to me.  I think for her I have become a pain stimulus; the sight of me reminds her of a painful episode in her life that she would prefer to forget.

     So I found a person worth knowing and I lost her at the same time.  Someday, maybe I’ll be able to explain to her that things happen for a reason, that we learn more from our failures than from our successes, all those other clichés that apply.  Someday, maybe I will be able to understand all that myself.

     

       

Book Report

    To be an English teacher, you have to believe that knowing how to read is one of the most useful skills a person can have.  By reading you can learn anything, go anywhere, experience what it is like to be another human being, another creature even.

    So God invented book reports.  (In an attempt to buy time to finish reading before he had to hand in a report, Moses dashed those early stone pages to the ground.)

     The idea behind book reports was that each student would get independent practice at reading comprehension without the help of instructor and fellow students.  Each person could choose a subject in which she was interested.

    Something there is that doesn’t love a rule, to paraphrase Mr. Frost.  That seeks, like water descending, the pin hole or rent in the fabric that will allow it to escape the container, to circumvent or nullify a rule.  Or is it to follow a higher rule, like the law of gravity?

      Suffice it to say that always there will be he (or she) who attempts to con the system, in this case, to find his way around reading a book.  They didn’t tell us in education classes that we would spend a lot of time trying to combat cheating.  The English teacher who wants to be able to look at himself in the mirror with some semblance of self-respect will have to deal with cheating on vocabulary tests and book reports.

      I was never very comfortable with the oral report because I always felt for the shy bashful one who hated standing up in front of the class giving a speech.  Then you never knew what sewage would flow from the mouth of certain characters in the room.

    So I depended on the written report.  It killed two birds—giving the student the chance to practice writing in addition to reading comprehension.  They were a pain and took time to grade, especially if I wasn’t familiar with the book being reported on.   I was still shaving using the mirror until colleague Joe relayed a tidbit of information to me.

     Students somehow think teachers are deaf. They self-incriminate at every turn, never in front of the one who will convict, but in front of any-and-everybody else.

     Maxine is charging $10 for a book report, Joe tells me.  What?  Yes, she reads the book (Maxine loved to read), writes the report, sells it to the cheater. 

     She has her rules.  The purchaser has to copy the report in his own hand and destroy the report—no selling it second hand.  Not only does that prevent duplicate reports being handed in by other students (a sure indication someone didn’t read the book).  It keeps the profit in Maxine’s purse.  (As Americans, you have to admire Maxine’s ingenuity and ambition to turn a buck or two with a beloved hobby.)   

     Joe turned to teaching late in life.  He did his student teaching in Nebraska.  His supervising teacher had a shelf full of books for which he had made tests.  The student had three weeks to read the book and then take the test to prove she had read the book.  Joe brought the system with him.  He persuaded me to adopt the system.

     The downside:  making the tests.  It takes a lot of time to make a valid check of comprehension.  The upside:  grading took little time.  Joe used short answer and completion questions.  I opted for multiple choice.

     One day after we had taken a book test, I was straightening chairs after everyone left.  Under a desk I found a slip of paper with numbers 1-30 and a letter beside each number.  A quick check showed that the pattern of numbers and letters matched the answers to the test we had just taken.  The water had found its way through the membrane.  The rule had been subverted.  Some earlier test-taker had copied the answers and had passed them on to another person or persons.

      I could:  make new tests (a lot of work), rearrange he questions, rearrange the correct answers.  I opted for option three.  With computers, it wasn’t too hard to change the answers around so that what was once correct answer “C” was changed to “A”, etc.  Before computers, the test had to be completely retyped.  Before Xerox established itself in the workroom, a new ditto master had to be typed and run through the spirit duplicator.  With computers and saved documents, it wasn’t too hard to change the answer sequence and print new copies.

    Then I had at least two different versions of each test with a different answer key.  I avoided labeling the test because that would make it easy for the cheater to figure out.  Each version had to look like every other version so the cheater would have trouble figuring out which cheat sheet to use.  I had to be able to identify which test key to use to grade each test.

     For many years I numbered each copy of every test so I could be sure nobody swiped one.  I asterisked the last test so I knew how many copies there were.  I made the even numbered tests one version, the odd-numbered another version.  The student put her test number on her answer sheet (if you mark on the test you are in trouble and I will know by the number on your answer sheet who marked on the test) and I would stack all the odd numbered answer sheets in one pile, the even numbered ones in another pile and could grade with the correct answer key.

     Life got a little easier when the library subscribed to a service that provided books AND tests for each title.  I had my own books with tests recommended for students headed for college.  If a student found a book impossible to read, she could, with my permission, substitute another book from the library’s many choices.  I also allowed extra credit for reading books off the library list.  (I had a fair-sized extra credit list with my own tests, too.)

      The library tests were taken and graded on computer.  Each test was ten multiple choice questions.  There were several questions for each book, but only ten were used.  Each time you brought the test up, you got different questions, so that prevented cheating by passing answers to another “reader”. 

      So that stopped cheating?  No.  The librarian had student assistants for every hour of the school day.  Students got an elective credit for working as a library assistant.  One brighter-than-average assistant found a way into the test program.  He brought up people who had read a book.  That person would take the test under someone else’s name.

     To stop that method of cheating, the librarian put the test program under lock and key and administered the test herself.  But we’re not done yet.

     When the student completed the computerized test, the program would grade the test.  The librarian would print out a copy of the test result which showed the student’s name and the title, author, number of points the book was worth (determined by length, reading difficulty, vocabulary, some other factors) and the number of correct answers out of ten.  The student brought me the copy to be filed and received either extra credit or substitute credit for an assigned book.  The computer kept a record of all the tests a student took over his four years in high school.  A student couldn’t get credit for reading a book a book more than once throughout her high school career.

     One bright energetic fellow worked pretty hard to duplicate that print-out with his computer.  He had the facts right, in the right order.  He couldn’t quite manage the company’s “letterhead” which appeared at the top of every test result.  His fraud was soon discovered.  Thereafter, the librarian personally signed each print out.  No library-lady’s signature, no credit.

     Then I retired.  Did the attempt to work the system end when I left?  I doubt it.

     Were my citizens more dishonest than most Americans?  I doubt it.  Something there is that doesn’t love a rule.  It seems human nature to try to get around a rule, to work the system.

     Just ask the IRS.  They could write a book. . . . 

                    

Rattlesnakes I Have Known

     The Ford pickup rolled ever so slowly across the flat farmyard.  Dad tried to stop the forward roll of the ’50 Ford pickup by pressing his hands on the driver-side door and pushing rearward, his legs angled toward the front of the pickup, his upper body slanted toward the pickup’s rear, every muscle straining.

     He had come rolling into the yard, stopped abruptly and jumped out in a hurry.  The door slammed.  The pickup either never came to a complete stop, or it started rolling forward on the gentle incline that was our farmyard.  Dad apparently forgot to leave the thing in gear.  He didn’t want to take the time to open the door, jump in and engage the transmission.  He was in a hurry.  It is an indelible picture in my mind.

    I was riding my tricycle in the yard.  I didn’t see the snake.  I was pretty close to it, too.

    The other mental image of that day is Dad again, this time with some kind of flexible metal tube raised in an arc over his head, about to come down on the rattlesnake.  The tube was a piece of exhaust pipe for a Maytag gas-powered washing machine.  He killed the snake by whacking it with the flexible exhaust pipe.

     The earliest washing machine in my memory was a white with red trim ringer machine powered by electricity.  The exhaust pipe must have been in the dead-metal pile near the shop.  It must have been the nearest thing for Dad to grab.  There would have been shovels and bars in the shop, or a gun or two on the back porch.  He must have been in a hurry.

     I don’t remember being removed from the scene, but I bet I was, before anything else happened.  I don’t have a clear picture of the snake or the disposal of its dead carcass.  From that time on, I have had a fear of snakes that I have never completely conquered.  It was my first experience with a rattlesnake.

     Most of my rattlesnake experiences happened in Kansas, in my front yard.   November of 2007, I came home from a day of helping a contractor tear off and replace shingles.  There he was, a rattlesnake stretched out in the driveway tracks.  Jesse the dog was visiting.  She spent the day in the pickup while I was on the roof.  She got a little more pickup time while I went into the house and grabbed the shotgun.  I let Jesse out after I had the snake safely interred.

    Sometime early in the 21^st century, the Goodwife and I were coming home in the old Buick we had bought from the church.  This snake was lying on the west edge of the driveway, about 30 yards south of the garage.   The Goodwife was driving.  She stopped and backed up.  I tried to convince her that I should get out and make sure it was a rattler.  But no, back and forth we went five or six times over the hapless critter.

     Finally, I said, “Do you think you killed it?”  Turned out not to be as facetious as I intended it.  I waited till we were safely garaged before I got out of the car.  I walked back to where the mangled snake lay. The rattle portion was pretty badly damaged.

    I put in a call to Brett.  He was one time a custodian at school.  He was also a taxidermist who made some spending money with his hobby.  His specialty was lifelike rattlesnakes coiled and ready to strike on pieces of weathered lumber.  He once brought a trailer out to the farm to take a load of weathered boards left over from the destruction of the old tin barn that went down to make room for the current red barn.  He also used some of the wood to make rustic picture frames.

     Brett decided it might be worth his time to take a look at the mangled snake.  I warned him that the rattles were damaged, but he said that was okay, he had lots of rattles.  He showed up about an hour after the execution.  I followed him out to the site.  He picked up a good size rock from the road and tossed it at the snake.  Never assume it’s dead, he warned.

     Sure enough, the rock landed by the snake, and faster than you can blink an eye, that snake did a 180, the head facing north as it lay “dead”, now facing south, and us.  We both backed up, but the snake held his position.

     I brought a gallon ice cream container, the closest thing I could come up with for the bucket Brett requested.  He got a stick about a yard long and very carefully ran it under the snake’s midsection.  Carefully he lifted the snake.  It held the same posture as it had on the ground.  I thought it might hank limply over the stick like a rope, but it came up still stretched out.

    Carefully, Brett let the snake tail first down into the pale.  He worked the upper body and head down until the snake was all curled up in the bucket.  Then very, very carefully, with his hands at about four and eight o’clock on the ice cream lid, he started it up from the ground beside the bucket, worked it slowly over the top of the bucket, keeping his hands out of the way as much as possible.  He got the lid on and snapped it firmly in place.

     “Now what, Brett?” I asked.  How you gonna get him out of there?”

     “I’ll put him in the freezer for four or five days.  Then he’ll be safe to handle.”  Brett said he could get up to $375 for a mounted rattler if he left it on display in the local gun shop during pheasant season.  

     One rattlesnake I almost thought was pretty.  Brett had begun working for K-Dot, the state highway folks and was out of town.  It was summer and I was in a hurry to get back to the farm.  I needed some kind of lumber for a project at the farm, and I knew right where to get the lumber.  It was under the overhang on the west side of the house. 

      I walked along the south side where the deck is now.  As I crossed the west sidewalk, I came to a sudden halt and slowly backed up.  About two paces in front of me, stretched out in the grass, was the rattler.  It was a hot summer day, but I was chilled.  As I sighted the rattler’s head over the bead on the 12 gauge, I saw that he really had a pretty pattern and a slightly different color than most of his breed.  Too bad Brett was out of town.

     I went about my business of getting lumber from the pile beneath the overhang, but I found it very difficult to back up.  I had to be eyeing where I stepped all the time.  In the back of my mind was the story in Huckleberry Finn where Huck coils the dead snake near Jim’s bedroll for a joke.  The dead snake’s mate came along and waited patiently by the corpse all day and bit poor old Jim when he went to crawl into bed.  A snake as pretty as the one I had just dispatched had to have a mate somewhere near.  (It never showed up, that I know of.)

      The case of the woodpile rattlesnake had a sort of gallows humor to it.  It was spring and I was cleaning up around the yard.  I was carrying remnants from the near the garage where I had used the table saw, across the driveway to the woodpile.  A bunny, one of a ubiquitous supply, lay twitching in the grass near the woodpile. 

    I didn’t think too much of the sight because of experiences I had a few times during the winter.  The first time I saw the “dead” adult bunny, I dug a hole in the road ditch near the driveway.  When I went with the shovel to pick up the “dead” bunny stretched out in the yard, he jumped up and took off running.

     The Goodwife didn’t entirely believe my story of an epileptic bunny, so after one or two more seizures, the bunny had one just outside in front of a west window.  I went inside and took the Goodwife to the window.  We watched for maybe five minutes.  The bunny sat up, shook his head a few times, and finally loped off.  My story was suitably corroborated.

     So when I saw the young bunny twitching in the grass by the woodpile, I just said to myself, “Hmm, epilepsy handed down to the next generation.  Another epileptic bunny.”  I turned with my armload of wood scraps to the pile I had been visiting all morning.  I stopped in midstep with the sudden hissing and rattling coming from near the pile.

      This one was a young snake, not very long, but apparently hungry, judging from the size of meal he had chosen, and apparently suitably poisonous.  He crawled under the woodpile where he could watch me.  I was afraid to take my eye off him because if he disappeared, I’d never be able to pick firewood off the pile without a ten foot pole.   I hollered until the Goodwife came to see what was the ruckus.  By the time she arrived on scene, the little bunny had ceased twitching.

     She returned with shotgun and shell, and I dispatched the snake under the woodpile.  This time, neither bunny nor headless snake took off when I approached with the shovel to bear them to their grave.

     The most exciting rattlesnake story was also our first rattlesnake adventure at our rural Kansas home.  One of the advantages of moving out of town was the girls could have dogs.  I wouldn’t let them have a dog in town.  It wasn’t fair to have a dog penned up in a yard or dog run.  So we had two dogs who roamed free of fence or leash.

     It was fall, we had returned from Colorado to start the new school year, and I had plenty of yard work to catch up on after a summer of neglect.  One afternoon after school, I was running the lawn mower on the north side of the house.  The Goodwife came running around the east side of the house, obviously in great distress, yelling something I couldn’t hear over the roar of the lawn mower.

     When I shut the mower off, she informed me there was a rattlesnake in the front yard.  Then I could hear the dogs barking.  I came around the house to see a good sized rattlesnake coiled under the bush near the sidewalk in the front yard.  He was rattling furiously, his head swiveling back and forth to keep an eye on all the potentially harmful creatures in his vicinity.

     Licorice, the little black dog, was nervously running back and forth near the garage, a good, safe thirty feet away from the snake.  His bark had reached hysterical pitch.  The girls stood on the porch watching.  Iko, the hyper lab mix, was very uncharacteristically sitting on her haunches in the shadow of the house, watching the snake, barking occasionally.  She looked like a sunflower plucked from the earth about an hour ago and left in the sun.  Her leaves were all wilted and her usual vibrant joy of life had left her.

     Iko had “killed” a huge bull snake a few days earlier in the right-of-way that runs east of the yard and allows access to the pasture and the many utilities therein.  Apparently, the bull snake had grown accustomed to our traffic pattern of coming up the driveway and turning into the garage.  When a pickup towing a trailer full of horses came up the drive and didn’t turn into our garage, it ran its four axles over the snake stretched across the roadway.  Iko found the wounded snake and finished it off.  The rattlesnake had proved to be a more vigorous opponent. 

      I thought briefly of shovel or hoe.  Then I thought of the shotgun leaning in the corner of my closet, the box of shells on the floor near the butt.  That would be easier on both the snake and me.

     Having fetched the shotgun and shells, the Goodwife joined the gallery on the porch.  I circled around the snake, finding a path that would allow me to hit the snake and not the bush, nor spectators, nor any cattle in the nearby pasture.

     The shotgun blast provided the exclamation point to the uproar.  The headless snake went limp, its rattling ceased.  The dogs stopped barking.  A moment of silence ensued. 

      The danger of the snake over, its poisonous head blown into oblivion, our attention turned to Iko.  She was bleeding from the tongue

     The Goodwife put in a call to the local vet.  In his usual laconic style, the vet bluntly stated that if Iko was a big dog, she would survive, a little one, she would die.  Bleeding from the tongue didn’t mean she got bitten on the tongue.  The poison breaks down the capillary walls.  A bite anywhere on the muzzle would cause the tongue and nose to bleed because the capillaries are close to the surface in the tongue and mucous membranes.   He didn’t keep antivenin because it was $100 per dose and had a shelf life of 30 days.  Bring her in and he would give her an antibiotic and an antihistamine.

     So Iko, who loved to ride in the back of the pickup and would easily jump in anytime the tailgate was lowered, had to be helped into the pickup for a fifteen minute visit to the vet’s office.  By the next morning her energy had returned.  The only ill effects beyond the first night after the bite, was a swelling that affected first one jaw for a day, the other jaw on the second day, and her entire face on the third day. 

     By the fourth day everything was back to normal.  After that, any snake that crossed Iko’s path was a dead snake.  She would grab them behind the head where they couldn’t bite her and shake them with her powerful neck and jaws.  They would pop like a bull whip and they would be dead.         

      There would be no more snake problems as long as Iko was on the premises.

      In the annals of the earth, man and dog surpass the rattlesnake’s ability to kill.