Water at the house

Water at the House

We moved to the little house on the hill in the country before I started school. You could tell it was country because it was five miles down a one-lane sand road to the closest gravel road. This meant that there were no amenities like a furnace or running water. The wood for the stove was pretty close. All you had to do was walk outside and look in any direction. There was the wood for the heat. My dad would cut down the big trees, and then drag them up close to the house with his old two-cylinder John Deere tractor. Then he would hook up “Johnny” to the buzz saw and we would drag the wood to it to be cut to length. Since I was the oldest of the boys, and I only came up to his belt buckle, dad would split it and throw it into a big pile. From there it was up to me to get the wood to a pile closer to the house, and then to keep the wood bin inside full all of the time. The big joke at the time was that I thought my name was “Get Wood” until I was about fourteen years old.

I had several smaller brothers, a baby sister, and now a newborn baby brother. My mother was young, and it could be said that we all grew up together. There were two big rooms in the house and three smaller ones. You came into the kitchen, and then went on into the living room where the wood stove was. On the side were three unheated rooms that were separated from the rest of the house by curtains. When I say unheated, that is exactly what I mean. On cold winter mornings when you first get out of bed the linoleum floors were so cold that they would stick to your bare feet. That was OK, because it was just a short run to the kitchen where mom had the propane oven going, and the door open. We would put the kitchen chairs around the front, and put our feet on the door of the oven to warm while the heat from the wood stove started warm up the rest of the house.
One year after I had started going to the big school, my grandmother had stayed overnight with us. It happened that the window by my bed had a broken windowpane, and there was a small snowdrift on my covers when she came in to wake me up. I had about five layers of blankets on me, so I was toasty warm underneath it all, but the site was disturbing to her. Not being a subtle person, she began to scream at my dad who was getting ready for work. “Charlie, Get your self in here” (Paraphrase) All I know about that is we had a kerosene stove with an electric blower motor in there right after that. It ran all night, and the house was warm all of the time after that.

Well, water was quite another story. There was a hand pump well about 75 feet from the house, but the water from it was pure rust. It was undrinkable, and unusable for washing. The next closest source was still a hand pump, but it was way down past the barn, and down the hill from there. I’m talking a hundred and fifty yards away, and down a pretty good size hill. The well there was a dug well, and bricked up on the sides. My grand dad had dug it, and the water was cold and pure. One time it ran dry, and my dad said it had filled in with sand. He lowered me down to the bottom on a boatswain’s chair with a bucket and a shovel. I would fill the bucket with sand, and he would haul it out and dump it. My job was the easy part. The well was so deep that looking straight up in the daytime I could see the stars in the sky. What a weird feeling. When I found water, I found it all at once. It came in so fast that dad couldn’t pull me out faster than the water came in. I basically swam out, holding onto the rope. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I suppose there is still a perfectly good shovel down at the bottom of that well. One very cold day when my cousin Johnny was visiting he was “asked” by his dad to help me carry water to the house. He was a year older, and every bit as country as me. He had one thing I didn’t though. An older brother, who was a mechanical genius, and extremely fond of jokes. I found out that day why not to put your tongue onto the pump handle.

The water I carried in two five-gallon buckets every day was used for drinking and washing. There were seven of us in the house, so the trip down the hill was frequent. We kept a five gallon galvanized bucket just inside the kitchen door with a drinking ladle in it. This was our communal drinking source. When one member of the family had a cold, we all had a cold. As far as washing, that was another matter. On a daily basis, it was pretty much wash your hands and face in the sink, and that was that. Bathing, on the other hand, was once a week in a galvanized tub we would put in the center of the kitchen floor. It held four trips to the well of water, and was heated by putting an electric “doughnut” into the water. This doughnut heated the water all right, but it was poor practice to touch the thing when it was heating up. The shock would feel like it was jerking your arm right off. I hated carrying the water, and complained bitterly. No one else was big enough to bring enough water that mattered, and I felt put upon. To make things a little easier than just carrying two buckets in my hands, I made a yoke to fit my shoulders, and was able to fill the buckets up even more. Still a pain.

My mother had lived in a house with running water, and had some problems with the concept of raising five children without it. Our toilet was a short path to a small outhouse at the edge of the yard. Cold winter days made that an extremely short trip. As I said, my mother was not enthused by the conditions, and I had heard some comments to my dad on their remedy. He had explained in the hearing of all, that a four-foot deep trench would have to be dug all of the way to the well, and a pit big enough to fit the pump in dug to actually get running water to the house. He generously said that he would buy the pump and hose once the trench was dug. His health prevented him from digging the trench himself, and since he grew up that way in the first place, what was the big deal anyway. There was obviously no money for a trenching machine, so this would all need to be dug by hand with a spade. One day my mother had heard all of this she wanted, and went to the barn for the spade. She started digging at the side of the house where she thought the line ought to go, and started a trench wide enough to stand in towards the barn. We all thought we would pitch in with our coffee cans and other implements of destruction, until dad came home. He said: “Your mother wants this, let her dig it”. For the next week we all watched her dig that trench like a set of vulture cheerleaders. She got most of the way across the yard, and was entering the garden area when dad came out to check on her progress. It seemed plain to him that she wasn’t going to give up, and that it would be much easier for everyone if he let us boys help along. He told us to simply “Help your Mother”, and we all jumped in like badgers at an Amish house-raising. Coupled with our other chores it took all summer to get the trench down to the well. Dad was good to his word, and one day he showed up with a brand new Sears’s pump and reels of plastic pipe. Before winter we had water in the sink in the kitchen. Our life changed forever. We still heated water on the stove, and in the big galvanized tank, but the communal water bucket and that dreaded trip to the well were things of the past.