Hey y’all its Pete’s Uncle Mudwink again. Ol’ Pete ain’t feeling up to snuff, so I thought I’d get his Uncle Raymond to put another one of them tales Pete likes to tell on the Internet this evening. Of course it won’t be his tall tale, it will be mine, but I am sure you folks is old enough to know what’s what these days. At least y’all ought to. I reckon I oughta have my old tired hide in bed at this late hour, but I can’t sleep. I took the heartburn with all them onions in my hamburger steak, and I reckon I just gotta wear it out.

Anyway, I wanted to tell y’all fine folks about the time I dug my own water well. Yessir, folks used to do that a lot back when I was a young man. This was right about the time I got out of the military and came home. I was a fine strapping man, plenty of sass and muscle and I didn’t take no bull from no smart mouth or no work either. I didn’t mind it, and I could work all day back then.

That’s back when Big Daddy was alive, and I didn’t mind working alongside my daddy neither. We worked well together, and we could nigh work from dark to dark, if we had enough good biscuits and taters in a sack. But the one thing we didn’t have on that old job site was water. Not a single drop and none nowhere nearby at a gas station, anything.

Now back in them days, it was kind of hard to bring water to a site, unless you had canning jars, and they wasn’t no way to keep it cold. Oh some of them had ice in them big old fancy coolers, but this site was right out in the open. We was laying the foundation for that big ol’ shopping mall that used to be up around Jackson, or Southaven, I forget which one we was building, and that was a mighty long time ago, so y’all bear with me.

Somehow or another them engineering boys forgot to put in a well and water works for that site, and that crew had over 50 men. Nobody thought to bring a military water buffalo, as that wasn’t done back then, and we had them yellow and orange coolers with the lids, but that water didn’t last no time in those things and it tasted funny. And they wasn’t no such of a thing as bottled water neither. You brought it or you didn’t have no water, period.

Well me and Big Daddy got tired of hearing all them men bellyache about no water available on that site while we was working. You see, Big Daddy was the foreman, and everybody called him Big Daddy and always looked to him to fix stuff. Well this particular day, it was drizzling just enough that nobody could lay pilings, or concrete or forms or anything because of the muddy old red dirt. And the boss had forgotten to tell them men to take a rain day. So here we all was, bored out of our gourd.

About half the men there that day, that didn’t get the rain message went home after they got to the site. That left me, Big Daddy and an old hand or two that couldn’t go home until one of us drove them back home on the way. They were sitting there bellyaching, moaning and complaining and of course they had done run out of water. I told them to get a cup and try to get some of that rainwater, but they couldn’t catch enough to drink much. And man it was some kind of hot. It felt like the surface of the sun with that heat and water vapor rising up off that concrete we had already poured and surfaced.

So me and Big Daddy had us an idea. We got the welder, the grinder and the torch, and an old forked stick and told them other two men that we was going to punch a well. In them days, everybody had every single kind of tool and part known to man on their truck, and we just happened to have two or three hundred feet of old pipe we could use for well casing. Talk about providence!

Directly, Big Daddy called to me to fire up the torch, and get the grinder hooked to power. He told me we was going to gin us up a sand point. And we did too! Big Daddy got that old hickory stick off the seat of his truck, and said we was going to use that stick to witch us up a water well. That old stick would point to the best place to get us a well dug, and we would find water close to the surface, and the height of the aquifer would be indicated by how hard the stick pointed down.

I tried for years to use that method to dig wells, but all I got was aggravated and sunburned. Back to my story. Big Daddy took that forked hickory stick, and started walking around, holding it in his hands like a wishbone, with one handle in each hand like the letter Y. He marched around for ten minutes, shut his eyes and got still like he was listening for something, and I was kind of close to him. Right there about 300 yards from the west part of the site, I watched that stick twist so hard toward the ground in his hands, I thought it was going to jump slam loose from his grip.

He said, “Muddy, go over yonder and drive one of them stakes right there. This is where we gonna dig. We will find water about 25 feet or so down to the shallow sand aquifer if my stick is right.” That always blew me away, how he was able to witch that water like that. So we took our pipe with the sand point fashioned on the end of it, and went over there to where I put that stake with a blue flag ribbon on it, and we commenced to driving that thing into the ground, straight up and down.

We had to put a cap on it so we didn’t mushroom the pipe threads. We put about three of them ten foot sections on there and when we got the last one threaded on, I whomped on it til about the 25 foot mark, and sure enough water started kind of trickling out of it. Old red dirt water, with mud and such. We didn’t have a pump, and we didn’t get lucky and find no artesian feed, but there was water there, even if it was red at the moment.

He told them other boys, “Yall hop in the truck with me and Muddy. We gonna run y’all back to the house, and me and Muddy here is going to the hardware store to get us a hand pump for this here water well.” So we all piled into that old GMC four door, and hightailed it to the local hardware store, where we all got us an RC Cola, a Moon Pie and that old red hand pump. Come to think of it, I just got me a soda water, red Nehi since I never liked the taste of RC. Reminded me too much of chewing tobacco for some reason.

Me and Big Daddy dropped those helpers off at their trailer in town, then we commenced to driving back to the site to install that hand pump. We got it put on, and took some of the rainwater that collected in the buckets, and primed that old pump. We pumped and pumped on it for about five minutes, and soon we had a nice stream of red dirt, rusty looking water coming out of it.

Big Daddy wasn’t too satisfied with the flow however, so he pulled the pump back off, and put in an air fitting between the base of that hand pump, and the pipe coming out of the ground. He took that electric air compressor, and blew that compressor hard down that pump, to blast that sand away from the point. When he stopped the air compressor, right about then you could see the water coming up pretty good out of that pipe.

We put the hand pump back on it, put some bricks around it to keep some idiot from driving over it with one of the construction machines or a vehicle, primed it up again with that bucket of rainwater, and we got it pumping water. We kept at it until the water ran clear, and our hands and shoulders gave out from pumping that water up from the ground. We took a drink of it, and it was really sweet tasting water. We was some kind of pleased with ourselves too.

We came back to work the next morning, and discovered that all them construction hands had already discovered our little water pump, and they kept coming up to us telling us thanks for putting in that well. We kind of shrugged it off, but that water well was still being used when we left that jobsite, and I think its still there today, hand pump and all.

Just goes to show you, a body can make stuff happen if he just uses his noggin and don’t wait on nobody to tell him no. All them men, and us got fresh water that was nice and cool right out of the ground, and all it cost was three sections of old pipe we was going to throw out anyway. Big Daddy paid six whole dollars for the hand pump at the hardware store. Somebody put a gourd dipper and a little roof sort of thing over it, so you could kind of cool off when you got a drink. Man them was some good times.