Water, Coal, and Farming in a Desert

(Written about 6 weeks ago)

Today was another of my writing days. Naturally, this meant an adventure having nothing to do with writing.

We live, and farm, on land that is one inch of precipitation away from a desert. We have no rights to the river (see: stream) which flows through the land. Thus, our well is our lifeline. Without it neither our garden, nor the critters, nor we can survive.

My husband came to me this afternoon, as I was just settling down from running errands for the farm, to tell me, in that terrifyingly portentous voice of his, “we may have a problem.” If you're picturing Tom Hanks talking to Houston right now, you've got the idea. “I need you to listen to the well pump. It's making a strange sound.”

Well-pumps are like babies, buildings during an earthquake, and rocket boosters—you never, ever, ever want to hear them making strange sounds.

I knew my writing day had essentially ended, and walked outside. Sure enough, the pump was not only making a very disturbing sound, it was making it really loudly. My guess—which I would just like to point out turned out to be correct—was that the filter on the pump had gotten seriously clogged and needed to be cleaned out. This was a reasonable assumption, given that our water is very heavily mineralized and, of late, the water coming out of our faucets was proving a lot redder than usual (indicating a high iron content, a compromised filter on our pressure pump in the house at the very least, if not a cistern needing a good cleaning, and a potentially compromised well-pump filter too).

Of course, my husband being the methodical, moon-in-Virgo type that he is, we couldn't trust my intuition and go straight to that. We needed to problem solve sensibly, ruling out various possibilities one at a time. My husband's fear sensors had already gone to DEFCOM whatever, and were seriously fretting over the two worst case scenarios: the pump was dying (bad) or the well had gone dry (catastrophic).

I can't make fun of my husband for this because my mind tends to run towards the catastrophic as well, but this wasn't my first rodeo, and the last time the well-pump stopped working, as I was busy freaking out, his sensible problem-solving brought me in off a ledge and fixed everything fine even though he wasn't in the state at the time.

We did things his way. First I tried turning the pump breaker off and on to see if that helped. It didn't. By now the pump was practically having an articulate argument with us it was so unhappy. The next step, the husband suggested, was to open the cistern and see if we could tell whether water was in fact going into the cistern from the well.

This may sound simple enough, but it's not. For one thing, our cistern is underground. For another, we haven't had to open it in 18 months, and for a third, we live in a valley east of the Great Sand Dunes National Park. In practical terms, this means that every winter our fields, garden beds, and any other bits of earth around the house are covered in drifting, course sand. It took my husband a while to even find the cistern. Once he did, we had to dig it out from beneath two feet of compacted earth.

And goat poop, because our goats love to pasture and sit nearby. Unfortunately, this means that when we finally were able to lift the obscenely heavy concrete lid off (not before nearly crushing both of our sets of fingers and wrecking both of our backs), we got to watch not only sand, but goat poop fall into the cistern holding our drinking water. Nifty.

My husband sent me running for a strainer so he could strain the, as-yet, floating poop out of the cistern. Doing this, of course, required leaning so far into the cistern he a) nearly fell in and b) inadvertently pushed a great deal more sand into the water.

At any rate, ultimately we were able to see that the float—which tells the pump when to come on in order to fill the cistern—was at it's lowest point, and if there was water coming in from the well at all, it was doing so very slowly. My poor husband even extended himself head first into the cistern again to ascertain if he could feel it coming in through the intake. It was, but not with much strength.

So we conceded we had to open up the well itself, haul up the pump and see if we could figure out what was wrong with it. My husband was reluctant to do this; I didn't understand why until we had to put the pump back into the well. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was sent to turn the pump off again, collect tools and a tarp, and eventually cleaning materials. When my husband pulled the pump out, the last five feet of the electrical cord attached to it was coated in a black substance. The pump itself had this hard black substance all over it, and the filter was nearly completely blocked by crusted black goo. I told my husband I'd seen this before, and he had too, but never this bad. I wondered aloud that it must be some kind of mineral, perhaps a bacteria.

“It can't be coal,” my husband said.

Ding, ding, ding!!!

“Of course it can! That's it! It has to be! It's hardened, congealed coal dust picked up along the seams with the water.”

The primary economic driver of this area, until relatively recently, was coal-mining. Coal is as indigenous to this earth as the iron that stains all our appliances, the sand from the dunes, and the Apache, not necessarily in that order.

As we cleaned the filter, first with a flathead screwdriver, scrape, scrape, scraping, and then with a toothbrush, vinegar water, and baking soda, our hands were dyed black by the wet coal dust. The smell permeated everything—if you've never smelled wet coal, trust me, the smell is wholly unique and you never forget it. It's not bad, necessarily, just strong. I felt like an idiot, like somehow I had let my entire family down, not being able to recognize it immediately. It's something, like alcoholism, hospitality and fighting, intrinsic to my extended family.

Eventually we set the pump in a five-gallon bucket of vinegar water and turned it on.  It ran like a champ, and we were able to reinsert it in the well. This process was what my husband affectionately likes to call a relationship test. I wish for you, here and now, that you never, ever have to get a well-pump back in a well. But if you do, seek marriage counseling before and after.

After we finished (remarkably remaining married) I looked at my hands. They were coated in black coal dust. I can't explain how right this felt to me, or how stupid I felt that it took me so long to figure out what the substance was. See, my grandfather was not only a miner, but an organizer of the nascent United Mineworkers union back in Western Pennsylvania in the 1920s. My immigrant grandma got arrested walking the picket line with him (but was eventually released to go home and feed her 9 kids). Both my uncles worked as coal-miners, my brother was a steel millwright, and I can't listen to the song “Youngstown,” by Bruce Springsteen, without crying. Coal runs through my veins, metaphorically, and now, apparently, also literally. I should have known such a close relative on sight.