Aaron loves to dig. (“If I could make a living doing it, I’d be happy.”) Digging turns the human back into a nodding oil rig, as if hinged in two pieces; it renders a person automatic. I think he likes it because it’s full of simple purpose—just one scoop after another, nothing much to think about but progress made real. I feel the same satisfaction in the minutiae of kitchen labor. Whenever Aaron seems crabby, I’m tempted to hand him a shovel; and when I get surly, he wants to set me in front of a bushel of shell peas.
That summer, he shoveled out the hole where the porch would sit and a wide moat around the house in which we could plant flowers, holding back the dirt with lanes of dry-stacked fieldstones. It took just a single summer for the long prairie grass to grow in nets around the rocks and hold them in permanent suspension.
Then we set out to plant everything we’d need for the long term, the yard crops that turn a country place into a homestead. We got some horseradish roots from Aaron’s dad and planted them near the rock flower beds (a rookie mistake, for the spreading horseradish taproots would colonize my flower beds for years to come). I planted chive and tarragon, herbs that would return naturally every year, the chive so early that their moist green spires rise through the clear sponge holes of the melting snow. We planted rhubarb and crab apple trees and lilacs, the classic triumvirate of the Midwestern farmyard. On our walks through the woods, we always knew we’d found an old farmstead when we came upon any of these planted at the edge of a clearing. Lilacs outlasted generations; ours would probably outlast us.
We were still hauling our water that summer, and every couple of days we would go to George and Marie Kueber’s place down the road to fill up our five-gallon plastic tanks. I was well into the groove with the oil lamps, and the water kettle, and with splashing my face with cold water each night from the enameled basin. But even with four five-gallon jugs in our possession, we could hardly haul enough water to suppress the hoarding feeling. As the summer progressed, I began to catalog my peeves: how quickly the dirty dishes stacked into mountains, how impossible it was to rinse oily crud from your hands with cold water, how greasy and dark my bangs looked on the third day…the mosquitoes, which clamped onto my ankles when I was digging potatoes with such herd force that I feared I’d stepped on a hill of fire ants.
And the outdoor camp showers we took were a little cold. As I stood on a mere square of stone, the wind ravaged my naked body as a ribbon of warm water trickled through my foaming, shampooed head.
I began to long for the old days, when the power companies ran free electric lines to coerce rural people into getting hooked up to the grid. George and Marie had told us such a thing had happened to them in the 1950s, so I knew it was true. But in 1998 the power companies didn’t need any new customers. In fact, they didn’t give a crap if we hooked up or not. They let us know the terms and conditions: about ten thousand dollars, due to the length they’d have to run cable to us from the nearest box two miles away, a sum we could not afford.
But my cooking habit was thirsty. It needed more water. The garden agreed. That long dry summer, we babied the plants the best we could. After weeding, mostly we cheered them on. When it got really dry, we poured some of our precious hauled water into metal watering cans and stood by each plant for long moments with the heavy can levered from our hips. Anyone could see that this sustainable lifestyle was about as unsustainable as it gets.
“Aaron,” I said, growing gradually hysterical, “we need WA-TER. I am not coming back here next year without water, and I mean the kind that runs! From a real faucet!”
The next morning I contritely rephrased it. “It would be really cool if you could rig up something else.”
What we needed was our own well. Bruce came over to dowse for water—otherwise known as witching—and his out-held willow branch dipped at the bottom of the hill. It would be a trek, pumping the water there and hauling it up to the house, but we had no choice.
Aaron went to town to rent a well-pounder. I expected him to return with some kind of automated machine, but he came back lugging a heavy iron cylinder, which was open on one end. It looked like a giant hollow bullet with handles. Apparently we’d be pounding this thing by hand.
Everyone else who came over to help, friends Dave and Steph and Chris, knew what we were in for, all of them having known the joys of pounding a sand point at their own rustic places.
Taking turns heaving the pounder, we loaded five lengths of pipe, until when at about fifteen feet down, we hit hardpan.
Dave, a self-made expert in the engineering of homemade systems, looked down into the hole and said, “You’re getting close to a depth that will require a stand pump, not a hand pump.” We took turns again pounding through the hardpan, and an hour later, when the string finally came up wet, meaning we were in the vein, we were at about thirty-four feet. Dave said, “And…now we’re in stand-pump territory.”
Aaron’s junk pile in the yard actually contained a rusty old stand pump, but it was missing a few parts. We got into the truck and drove to visit the only person Aaron thought might have them, Leo Kueber—George Kueber’s younger brother. His tan house, the Kueber family homestead, stood tall on the only hill in sight, the road in front winding close to it, as it does in children’s books. At one time the house had anchored a small community called Goldenrod and Leo’s front parlor had been the town post office. Now a chair sat in front of an open window on the porch, a rifle sticking out through the screen.
“That’s my perch for eyeing wolves!” Leo cackled. “The cattle farmers around here—and that means me—appreciate that.” Shooting wolves wasn’t normally a position I took, but on him the lawlessness was charming.
He gave us a tour. At the center of his sprawling farmhouse kitchen stood an enormous cast-iron woodstove, its flat cook-top stretching six feet across. On the front sat a pot of Leo’s famous perpetual stew. It brewed all day, he ate some of it for dinner, let it cool overnight, and then added to it the next day. It was a woodstove thing.
Surprising to me, food was everywhere. Buckets of onions he’d grown. Two-gallon jars of mayo from the commercial aisle at the store. A gallon of peanut butter. Strings of peppers. A bushel of apples. It seemed that Leo the bachelor was quite the entertainer. Deer camp at Leo’s was legendary. Upstairs in the communal sleeping room, a toilet sat in the middle of the room, cordoned off by a calico curtain, a convenience installed to accommodate a room that came to life during deer-hunting season. The entire place was a nesting doll into the past, a journey of retrofitting through the eras.
We walked down the front steps toward the shed. Beaver carcasses littered the yard, tossed there for the dogs. The skulls had been lovingly licked clean, as white as if they’d been boiled. Some…not so clean yet.
“Doesn’t quite smell spring,” Leo said, by way of explanation for the brain-fogging stench and beckoned us into the shed. Of course he had the pump parts. He was an old-ways angel.