THE RETIREMENT YEARS
QUEST FOR WATER:
[Tragically, I have no fuzzy old photos to illustrate this.]
As mentioned before, we bought our mountain property with no real expectation of ever having running water. We originally built the house without plumbing and hauled drinking water from a spring far up the forest road for the first couple of years. Water for showering and cooking was collected in the spring runoff season from holes we dug in low spots and piped overland into a 1200-gallon plastic tank. As needed, we would supplement with water from a nearby creek and boil it to avoid giardia. Just about the time we were running low in early winter, the snow would fall; then began a continual process of melting snow on the wood stove and storing it in barrels.
As I write this from the current perspective of seemingly-infinite faucets, it sounds like some terrible hardship. Everything’s a matter of degree, and at the time it didn’t seem so extreme. It was just one of the chores we did like cutting firewood or plowing snow. Still: we dreamed of having a well…and as usual, DH had An Idea.
We’d been told when we bought the property that a dowser (water witch) had identified a potential well site on the mountainside high above our housesite. We were pretty skeptical of the dowsing, but that spot had willow growing around it and provided enough elevation for a gravity-fed supply if it panned out. We decided over time to try digging a well there, not because we really expected water. We just figured it was worth the effort for even the possibility of a gravity-fed water. DH also identified a site parallel to the house that had promising geography and vegetation but would require pumping.
A note about local geography. This mountainside featured seams of granite in bare outcroppings interspersed with deep soil. We’d always thought of granite as something impervious and enduring, but a lot of this rock was actually quite crumbly. The crumbled version (called decomposed granite or DG) was often found in water-collecting underground pockets. Running into a pocket of DG was a pretty good indicator of a water vein.
We managed to find water at both sites and developed wells at both. The hardest part was putting in the water lines. Rudimentary, not-to-scale drawing follows:
We hired a backhoe (with operator) to dig the trenches, but we were on a budget and didn’t want to pay for any down time or hauling the machine in and out more than once. That meant we needed to lay and bed the pipe as quickly as the operator could trench. The pipe was buried a minimum of 4 feet deep in all places to avoid freezing, and the backhoe was turning up about a 70/30 split between dirt and granite chunks. As soon as a 20-foot section of trench was opened up, DH and I would jump into the trench with shovels, PVC pipe, cleaning rags, primer and pipe glue. We’d throw out any remaining rocks, lay the next 20 feet of pipe, clean the ends, prime and glue them. Then we’d pull loose dirt from the trench sides over the pipe to bed it and protect from the rocks that would inevitably get thrown back in by the backhoe.** Climb back out of the trench, shovel some more rock-free dirt on top, and it was time to repeat for the next section. The whole length of pipe including the offshoot to well #2 was probably about 1300 feet, so we repeated this process more than 60 times. We gradually lost the race with the backhoe, so the operator was eventually filling in the trench behind us as we raced to keep up. No pressure, of course.
And on the 10th hour, we rested.
**We were determined to properly bed the pipe, because we had no desire to dig it back up. Neighbors had installed their water pipe with the help of a well-lubricated work party who threw dirt and rocks enthusiastically onto their water pipe and broke it. The owners didn’t know it was broken until they tested the system a year after the line was buried.
This frantic effort only got the water line within about 6 feet of our house. After that, it was all shovels. The dirt around and under the house was what locals called moon dust: fine as talcum powder when dry and just as irritating. Digging up to the house and installing a shut-off valve in a vertically buried pipe wasn’t so bad, but from that point on? Just don’t let me be reincarnated as a gopher, because it is Not Fun. The house was only a couple of feet off the ground, and our trench was 4 to 5 feet deep, so a great deal of digging was done on our knees. We wore bandannas over our faces and heads, but the dust invaded our eyes, noses, mouths, ears, shoes, pants…you get the picture. Without expectation of a well, we’d built the house with the kitchen and bathroom on the far side, so we dug 30 feet to that side and built an insulated box to hold the pipes rising into the house.
In the middle of this project, my brother came to visit us. We always seemed to be in the throes of some epic endeavor when he arrived, and he took it in stride. While we dug, he split and stacked firewood. Before he left, he said to me: “Watching you two together makes me understand the old term ‘helpmeet’.” High praise indeed.
The gravity-fed well worked out so nicely that we didn’t use the other one. City–dwellers are accustomed to turning on a faucet and having water pressure, but most with private wells have to pump the water into a pressure tank. Having great water pressure without a pump or a city water system never stopped seeming magic.