Home Below Hell's Canyon by Grace Jordan

Author:Grace Jordan [Jordan, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Rural, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, General, sociology, FICTION / General, history, Adventurers & Explorers, United States
ISBN: 9780803253032
Google: R9qRAQAACAAJ
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2013-12-15T00:12:40.098522+00:00

9

Before we could take our annual trip out, there was one project that should be completed, the securing of a safe and satisfactory supply of domestic water. The kitchen faucet was a big brass affair of unknown ancestry, and the water was piped down to it at lively pressure from the irrigation ditch. A hundred yards above the house this ditch emerged from the creek, skirted a cliff, cut through a trail, and flowed around the base of a steep rise to reach the yard. For drinking purposes the water might have been boiled, but it never was.

When the men irrigated the south field, the pipe to the house ceased to run, and if the faucet was thoughtlessly left open, trouble was bound to result after the irrigating was finished.

One afternoon as I picked raspberries, Steve strolled by, happy and casual. He paused to chatter a while, then remarked that “some water was running.”

“Where?” I asked, without stopping work.

“In the kitchen,” he said.

“Well, is it doing any harm?” I asked, continuing to pick.

The little boy appeared to be weighing my exact meaning, and then as if finally satisfied he said, “It’s kind of running out of the sink.”

My sub-level kitchen floor! I tossed away my pail, bolted the barbed wire fence, and flew. From the rim of the sink, water was indeed running. It creamed in a wide sheet, the linoleum was already floating up where it could, and across the threshold into the dirt-floored cellar a tide was lapping softly.

I splashed through to close the tap, then cried to the other children to help. With basins and buckets we bailed madly, and the level began to drop. Half an hour later, with a final mopping, we had done all we could. Given time, the cellar would take care of itself, but for days the kitchen would breathe a miasma of mold.

This unpleasant event could easily happen over and over. So Len talked to Mr. Russell, who was an expert on plumbing as well as on the operation of telephonic communication and the production of band music. Mr. Russell went with me to examine a small spring that rose from under a cliff near the first bend in the trail and presently lost itself in the creek. If this spring was reamed out and a wooden box with a low-level outlet was sunk in it, cold, clean water could be piped under the creek and down to the house. The buried pipe would be cool in summer and reasonably frost-free in winter.

So ditch-digging was added to Mr. Russell’s long day, and though he regarded this work as no compliment to his more artistic and technical skills, he began the task graciously. After a couple of weeks he called me to see the plank box with hinged lid which he had set in place in the spring. Looking down through the green depths, I found the screened outlet, already connected with the ground pipe.

“She’s ready to go!” Mr. Russell announced with triumph.

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