Power & Water Part I: The Well Goes Dry

If we didn't have public electricity and phone, I guess we'd qualify as totally "off the grid". No city water, no sewer, no garbage collection - and certainly no cable TV or internet. I'm not sure if cable TV even existed, probably somewhere. That other stuff did exist (besides the internet, of course) but it wasn't available to us. Our water came from a shallow well.

The well was (and still is) located at the back of the house, very near to the river. The problem with the well is that it dried up every summer. There was always that one day in June when you'd turn on the faucet and hear that obnoxious, sputtering, exploding sound of bubbles getting sucked through the system. A little brown water would sputter into the sink and that was the end of well water for the summer. You might have to haul a bucket of water up from the river to flush the toilet for a day or two, but pretty soon dad would initiate the summer water supply switchover.

This was a process we casually referred to as "switching to river water". Dad would chase the spiders out of his auxiliary water pump, wrestle some large, black pipes down the bank, and pretty soon we were back in business. You don't want to drink river water, for fear of the "beaver fever", so we would only use that for showers, dishes and toilets. Drinking water was served up in a large plastic cooler, on the kitchen counter - the kind you might take camping. Filling that up, in town, was part of the daily summer ritual, and usually the kid's job. We'd hop out of the car and fill the cooler at a hose or spigot, while mom waited in the driver's seat. That thing was heavy. As I got older, thankfully, it became much more manageable.

Dad's auxiliary pump sat on the rocks, down at the river's edge. There were a couple years when an autumn rain storm came sooner than expected and washed dad's fancy pump away in the flood. More than once he hopped out of bed in the night to drag it back up the bank, while I held a flashlight. The river wasn't quite capable of a "flash flood" - but the water would rise pretty quickly, and when it did, it transformed from my peaceful summer fishing hole, to a raging, muddy torrent of doom, complete with downed trees as battering rams. When that happened, the river water was no longer suitable as a water supply - it was too muddy. But that rain/flood was the same water that would fill the well back up again, so we could transition back to well water.

The final step was to check the water level and make sure there was nothing untoward floating in there. Despite dad's attempts do seal the top, sometimes critters would find their way into that well, and I don't believe any ever found their way back out with the breath of life still in them. Dad had a cut-off milk jug wired to the end of a long pole, which he would use to dredge the murky waters. More than once he came up with a drowned rat or frog. Apparently, those things weren't too disturbing to dad. He'd remove any dead floaters, dump a cupful of Clorox bleach in the water and declare it safe to drink. I don't ever recall the whole family becoming ill at the same time, so I guess he was right.