Remember water wells? Of course, you do. Well, we're looking for somebody to dig us one on our little piece of God's earth in the country.
Everybody that lived in the country while growing up had a dug water well, unless you had gutters around the eaves of your metal roof and a cistern for storage But as with many things that used to be, large dug wells are considered obsolete, now. Too ol' timey and dangerous. But water is water, and it comes out of the ground like it always did.
Since we've always had an ample supply of ground water, thanks to a good annual rainfall, we've never had to have many cistern water systems. But recently, when visiting in Live Oak County, we went to a large, modern residence out in the brush that used the system for both human and cattle consumption. The owner did, because there was no potable water on his vast acreage. (Don't know who came up with a word with "pot" in it to describe water fit to drink. The word brings up thoughts of pots used for purposes that are far less interesting to talk about than drinking water. Besides, I'm never sure if I'm pronouncing the word correctly. Why can't we just call it drinkable water?)
Nothing's too old to talk about, if it's as vital as water, so don't accuse me of never writing about things necessary for modern living. Much has been said lately about water rights. Seems they can be bought and sold separately from the land, like mineral rights. Somehow, both seem to go against the natural order of things, but if it's legal and people make money following the practice, it will be very popular. If you think the struggle over oil has reached a frantic state, wait 'til the fights over water begin in the not-too-distant future. Large cities in some states are already gearing up for the big life-or-death struggle.
The kind of well we need now is the kind where you're required to manually draw water from the dark depths of the earth with a bucket attached to a rope running through a metal pulley hanging above the curb. Those without ice boxes stored their sweet milk in a special bucket at the end of that rope. But if the milk cow (milchow?) had eaten bitter weeds the day before, you still got bad milk.
We still have lots of water wells, but they've been moved uptown. They supply community water systems. Some of those systems use lake water, too, but impounded water is never as good as well water. Unless its wells run low during a drought, the Appleby water system still supplies its customers with well water. Ask them. Their taste buds tell them when the system supplements its supply with Nacogdoches lake water. We'd like to hook up to their system, but I'm just a poor man, so have to look for ways to get the liquid gold without breaking the bank. No offense intended, Bobby. You preside over a great water system.
Before we had community water systems in the country, we had to dig our own wells if there wasn't a "well digger" in the area. There usually was such a man around who would dig you a new well or clean one out, when it began to fill with sand. Most of the good water was found in water sand, so it could be found almost anywhere. But some switched, or witched, for a proper site, believing that only certain people had the skills for that task. The believers used only those forked branches of certain kinds of trees. Some used coat hangers, or wires, as I recall. Divining rods they were called.
Well-diggers used short-handle picks and shovels for digging, placing the dirt in large buckets which their assistant pulled up and emptied. And the deeper the digger went, the cooler it got. A digger had to go down 40 to 70 feet, which gives meaning to the expression, "Colder than a well digger's toes." Is that the way you heard it said?
Few country wells were curbed all the way down to the water, so a well-digger's worst nightmare was a cave-in. Later, with the introduction of round concrete curbing and drilling rigs, sections of curbing were lowered by cable as the hole became deeper. We had good water at 40 feet in Smith County, and the driller was usually finished in half a day. Gravel or dry concrete was poured into the bottom to prevent sand from filling the holding area. Yes, concrete does set up in water.
If we have to dig a well to save money, I doubt we can find a well-digger like those of yore. And if we have to call upon a driller of 32-inch wells or one smaller and deeper, I'm afraid we'll find ourselves in that leaky boat which would require our money to flow beyond the reach of our limited budgets for deep holes.
Calvin Bowden is a contributing writer.
