There are certain sounds that reverberate in your mind for the rest of your life. You continue to hear them, years later, reminding you of that moment, that experience, that big uh-oh that you will never forget. For me, it was the sound of roaring water, exploding from a 6” main, freight training through metal, and slamming into a final garden-hose-sized reducer in what I assumed was a well-thought out plan to my water my garden. In hindsight, the plan was a tad off in some key areas that should have been a bit more apparent. But because I was actively ignoring common sense and logic, the sound of that day was indelibly seared into my memory.
At the time, I was a twenty-three-year old single mom, with three little kids, who had decided it a grand idea to buy a farm and move my urban-raised family to the middle of nowhere. “Farm” was a rather generous description. It included two acres of weedy dirt, tumbling outbuildings, rickety, saggy fence lines, promises of water and power somewhere on the land, and a dilapidated single-wide mobile home. So “farm” in the sense that it wasn’t the urban setting where I had spent my entire life but not the classic “farm,” conjuring images of cute farmhouses, red barns, white picket fences, content animals, all managed by someone who had a clue about living in the country.
I made up for my lack of knowledge with an abundance of energy borne of youth, boundless curiosity, ambition, and a desire to move my kids from a mobile home park, buried deep in the depths of what was quite literally, the wrong side of the tracks. At the time we moved, I owned a hammer and a flathead screwdriver, the only tools that I both possessed and knew how to use. To say I was unprepared was an understatement but the rosy haze of youth can blur the reality of just about every situation, including one’s first foray into homeownership.
The entirety of my experience with water and power included turning a faucet, flushing a toilet, and flipping a switch. Water would flow and lights would magically illuminate. Beginning and end of story, wrapped in the pretty ribbon of modern convenience. All provided by an allusive metropolitan body that cashed your monthly check in exchange for goods and services rendered. Conversely, if any of these things ceased to appear on command, there was a phone number for someone who would make it all better.
At some point in the buying process I had been made aware that there was water somewhere to the back of the property. On that fateful day, I set the goal of getting water from that point – wherever it was – to the front of my property and the 100-foot hose I slung over my shoulder would be the method to achieve that goal. I shielded my eyes against the brutal sun and trudged through the dust, aiming in the general direction of the back fence while a neighboring cow provided my only company. My trusty dog, Maggie, eyed me from the back stoop, wisely choosing to wait this one out. Perhaps I should have noted her apparent distrust as something more than laziness.
I considered myself a somewhat smart person. I had somehow, to that point at least, managed the primary goal of parenting: Keep little humans alive while they actively try to inadvertently off themselves. I had traversed high school and college with some level of success. I understood the basics of math, algebra, geometry, basic mechanics. Admittedly, I probably slept through some important tenets of physics which most likely played into the unfortunate – illuminating – outcome of this adventure. How difficult could this water thing be?
After an hour of wandering back and forth along the fence line, I finally found some hints as to where this water source lurked. A trip back to the shed for a shovel, a bit of hacking and digging, and there it was, a 6” threaded water main. I held the hose up to it, comparing openings, and chewed a fingernail as I pondered my predicament. The neighbor cow moved in closer, interested in my task, but still taking me in with wary caution. I shielded my eyes to search out Maggie and found that she had moved off the stoop to find a position a tad further away.
“Well, okay.”
An hour later I found myself in the irrigation section of the local hardware store, totally perplexed by the broad assortment of pipe, fittings, gender-benders, threaded vs slip, purple primer, blue glue, steel and plastic. In this pre-YouTube world, I was clueless. Enter, helpful hardware store guy. “Can I help you find something?” I quickly realized that I not only didn’t possess the necessary knowledge, I also lacked the language to explain what I was looking for. I gestured, hummed and hawed, mentioned the water source that was “this big” using my hands to demonstrate relative size, and generally flubbed my way through an explanation. “You need a reducer,” was his final pronouncement as he wandered off, obviously not as helpful as I had first assumed. In hindsight, there’s a good chance he was also not willing to take on the liability of this irrigation newbie.
Once the term “reducer” made it into my mind, I set about to find the thingy necessary to reduce a 6” pipe to a garden hose. Author’s note: Such thing does not exist in a single form and there is a reason for that. A good reason. One that involves things like pressure, velocity, physics, and ultimately, common sense. This is blindingly obvious in hindsight, but at the time it simply ratcheted up my youthful enthusiasm and stubborn focus. I persevered.
The resulting 6-foot stick of screwed-together galvanized pipe and reducers was a true sight to behold. I had abandoned the idea of PVC construction, deeming it flimsy and not as satisfying as galvanized. I dragged my contraption to the counter, paid for it, and drove home with a foot of the thingy hanging out the sedan window. Maggie greeted me with a low whine while I wrestled my prize from the car and headed towards the back pasture. She again, did not accompany me and I said “hi” to the cow who now hung her head over the fence to get a better look as I struggled across the dirt and weeds. So much for wo-man’s best friend. At least I had a cud-chewing cow for company.
With some difficulty, I disassembled the reducer masterpiece, attached the first piece to the water main, and then screwed the whole thing back together. I noticed that the pipe coming from the ground was starting to bend alarmingly in the direction of my work but passed it off as a minor detail. A sweaty hour later, I whooped loudly in glee as I attached the garden hose to the end with a dramatic flair. The cow startled and moved a few steps back from the fence. Maggie perked her ears from her distant vantage point and then again, moved further away.
I stretched the garden hose across the pasture, noting that 100-feet didn’t go quite as far as I had anticipated, but continued my work. Details for a later date. The next step still gives me the heebie-jeebies when I think back on the hole in the ground, lined with rusty metal, full of all forms of creepy-crawly things. At the bottom of this hole, sat the valve necessary to turn on and more importantly, turn off the water. I lay on the ground with my cheek pressed into an alarming number of ants and stickers and reached down as far as I could to grasp the valve. Thankfully, it turned with relative ease and I wrenched it on while simultaneously scrambling away from the hole in one slick ballet of graceless movement.
The cow wandered away, frightened by my wheeling arms, dancing feet, and frantic disrobement. I could feel spiders and bugs crawling everywhere on my body and couldn’t get my outer layer of clothes off fast enough. That was when I heard the sound. The sound that would haunt me for decades to come. It started with a growl that quickly grew in volume and intensity. The pipe that jutted from the ground stood at rigid attention, swinging the length of reducers up and straight out. The hose bucked and rolled in serpentine waves across the pasture. Then the source pipe began to bend backwards. I froze, my mind attempting to grapple with what was happening.
The cow had managed to press herself against the fence as far from this activity as possible, finding safety in a pasture obviously owned by a true-to-life farmer. Maggie was nowhere to be seen, a cartoon cloud of dust marking her hasty retreat out the front of the property. I backed away as the ground shook with my reducer creation now pointed directly into the sky, the pipe from the ground now pinned fully backwards. This was going to end poorly – potentially for everyone and everything involved – but I couldn’t think of a single way to slow the progress of the inevitable train wreck that was enfolding in front of my eyes.
There was a moment of still silence as we reached some level of frenetic stasis. I imagined control towers frantically rerouting flight patterns, NORAD scrambling jets, foreign governments calling for a national response, perhaps FEMA getting involved. What I didn’t notice at that moment was sprinklers slowing to a trickle in nearby pastures, water pressure dropping off mid-shower for my neighbors, a community well in the act of being artfully re-directed to the single water pipe that fed my lone plot of land.
Whoooooom! Pause. Crack! I dropped to the ground as the whole view in front of me exploded into action. The reducer contraption violently separated from the source pipe and started an airborne trajectory that included a slow (to me) arc with the garden hose tethering the front end. The hose itself then lifted off, following the metal missile into the air like the tail of a kite. I watched the path until I was blinded by the sun and the roar of water made me turn my head. I had unleashed an Old Faithful geyser that rose into the white sky in an impressive feat of pent up water pressure, draining the well that I shared with 20 farms into the air in a matter of moments.
“Holleeeee shit.”
In the distance, I could hear doors slamming open and closed as pickup trucks roared to life. Thankfully, I was far enough away to not be treated to the profanity I’m sure was being hurled in my general direction. There was no hiding as the geyser and flying pipe pointed straight at the person responsible for this mess. The clueless city GIRL had done it again, somehow making her foibles something for all the real farmers to fix. I had a rapidly growing reputation of being an eye-rolling pain in the collective ass of our entire area.
I sat back, completely drenched, surrounded by various articles of my clothing, as I watched the reducer project arc over my pasture and bury itself two feet into the dirt several hundred feet away. “So that’s what several hundred feet looks like. Perhaps I should have used a 200-foot hose,” I mused as I waited for the approaching cavalry to descend.
The geyser abruptly stopped with the final burst suspended briefly in the air as a neighbor shut off water to the entire area. It arced up, hung out, and then rushed down on me, adding to the muddy lake that grew steadily around my seated self. I ducked my head and plucked at my boot as the first truck roared into my pasture and skidded to a stop. “What. The. Hell.”
“Hi,” was all I could muster. “Sorry about…” I swung my arm in a broad circle, gesturing weakly to the destruction, “… this.”
“You should be! What were you thinking?!” Well, obviously I hadn’t fully thought through all the possible angles of my plan but I didn’t answer. Instead, I dragged my sodden self to standing and tried to maintain some level of pride while actively dripping into Lake Humiliation. I noticed Maggie making her way slowly through the pasture towards me. Now she wanted to help.
“Sorry. It won’t happen again.” I mumbled the words that would haunt me again and again over the next few years as I managed to teach my neighbors citified, girly ways to blow it up, burn it down, nail myself to it, fall through it, fumble into it, bury it, trip over it, and generally wreak havoc on anything and everything that crossed my path. There was never a dull moment for anyone as I barreled my way into the farm life dream.
Thank you, Dani, especially for that penultimate sentence.
You need to change tenants of physics to tenets....
Wow! I'm so glad you came out of that one in one piece!