A rare warm day in January, good opportunity to haul a tank of water. We've had so much cloudy, cold weather that when the sun comes out and the temp hits 20 degrees it seems like spring.
I fired up the "Oldsmobile truck" and headed out for the community well . About an eight and a half mile trip on good roads so I recorded some of the sights and sounds along the way. Water Hauling
As I crossed the mighty Jumping Deer creek I thought of how my grandfather had to haul water from just a little ways downstream from where I was crossing, During the winters of the 1930s sometimes the wells at home would run dry and there was no water for the house or cattle. So with a wooden tank on sleighs pulled by a team of horses he would make the approximate 3 mile trip to the creek to dip water out of a hole in the ice to fill the tank. Slow hard work and cold riding. Get home and dump the water into the now dry well at the farm and hope it lasted a few days.
The irony of this situation was that 3 years after my grandfather died, an excellent supply of water was found just a few feet from the house, only 40 feet below the surface. Too late to benefit him but his son and grandsons certainly appreciated it.
Nowadays I only have to haul drinking water as the well water is too high in minerals for human consumption. The cattle have no complaints though.
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ReplyDeleteSorry about the previous comment, Ralph, It's late for me and I forgot whose blog I was on! (Now everybody KNOWS that I'm losing it!)
ReplyDeleteHey, before I shut up and go to bed, I was just going to tell you that the farm where I was raised had nine springs, three hand-dug wells and a cistern. Where I live now, three miles away, there's only one spring and it's at almost the deepest part of the hollow while my house id half-a-mile away on top of the hill. It's not of much use to me, to say the least.
ReplyDeleteGorges, good drinkable water is one of those basic necessities of life that we take for granted until its not there. Anyone that had to haul water or ration it would likely have a true appreciation for it.
ReplyDeleteMy wife would just buy 100 cases of bottled water from the huge discount store...
ReplyDeleteWe had a sunny day here yesterday. I got a planting job. Today I think I will plant the tractor and drill.
The only question is how deep and how many tractors will it take to pull me out...
Buying bottled water would make economic sense for me too Budde. But a lot of things I do are not ecomically sensible it seems. Sometimes I do things because of habit, tradition, or because I feel like it. It was nice sunny day and I needed to hear my old truck running again.
ReplyDeleteAlways figured when the temp got all the way up to 20, Saskatchewanese put on their shorts and headed to the tennis court?
ReplyDelete