Pigs Don’t Fly. But They Speak Perfect English.

Just posted 9/17. Not edited and not finished. The best part of the story (and maybe the only entertaining part of the story) is coming up.

Pigs don’t fly. But they do speak perfect English

Call me a Handy-Man. I dare ya.

Always hated the term, but it’s true by definition. Seems like anybody that can tighten a screw or figure out how to wire a light meets that standard. I prefer something a little more refined. Like renovation or remodeling specialist? Residential construction expert? But that’s not something that’s normally left to up to me. When you don’t specialize in any one trade, like a plumber or an electrician, handy-man is about as accurate, and universally understood as anything.

As a handy-man I’ve worked on so many different jobs, I’m basically a jack-of-all-trades. In fact, I often tell new clients that there are only two things I don’t do when it comes to residential work…’I don’t do carpet and I don’t do countertops.’ It’s not that I couldn’t. It’s just that I haven’t. I don’t do countertops because I don’t have the required tools for fabricating smooth shapely cuts on granite and carpet because, more times than not, you can get someone to lay carpet as cheaply as you could do it yourself.

Either way, what I’m trying to say it that I’ve done a lot of different types of work as a handy-man. But nothing I’ve ever experienced could prepare me for what ensued when I went to work on a small trash ravaged farm on the eastern plains of Colorado.

Nothing could prepare me for Bob.

A had a newish client on the south end of Denver. When I say newish, I mean that I had done only a handful of projects over the past few months for her on her two story townhome. At the time, I was just starting to rebuild my residential services business after a brutal year and a half layoff when I tried to find gold in the rivers and fields around Reno, Nevada. But that’s another story.

My client recommended that I contact a friend of hers from church. She told me that Bob owned a small farm outside of Denver and that he had no running water. Her concern for the state of the man’s well-being registered in her voice. She thought that if I talked to Bob, we could come to some sort of arrangement to go out, fix Bob’s pump so that he could take a shower, wash his clothes and live like any resident of our modernized civilization does.

A few days later, during some downtime (I had a lot of that in those day, courtesy of my aforementioned gold adventures), I gave Bob a call. He seemed very affable. He told me the story. The farm was his home. Now in his 60’s, Bob had grown up on this land, his father’s before it was his. Over time, as he had grown older, the property had come in to disrepair partially due to a lack of expendable income and more importantly, the passing of his mother which had left him in a depressive state. His water line had fallen victim to this lack of capital and a some just straight bad luck. I agreed to come take a look. I mean, that kind of work is outside my wheelhouse, if I’m being honest. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this industry, none of this stuff was rocket surgery or brain science…how hard could it be?

Just east of Denver, where the horizon line extends farther than eye can see, only interrupted by the gentle ebb and flow of the small grain-filled hills sits a bunch of unremarkable homes, small farms and non-majestic ranches. I drove down the washboard two-lane road looking amongst the small farms for Bob’s address. I had written it down on a small notebook on my seat.

It's hard to find house numbers on back country roads. The only thing that I knew about the property is that Bob had a few pigs that he raised. So, in my minds-eye I’m see a older farm house, with maybe a stainless-steel barn and some pig in a pen out back.

As my vehicle joggled its way down the well-traveled washboard, a plume of dust rising up behind me, I came across a house, which sat anchored but a fairly modern ranch-style home. In front, a small semi-circular drive was blocked off by two beat up old pick-up truck. As I cleared the house, the yard slid away down the slope. There, a bus, two semis; one bob-tail, one with trailer. Campers, a couple decrepit out buildings, three tractors in various states of decay. There was a rough-hewn mud track running down through a waist high sea of weeds and a couple late model cars, with and without tires riding on blocks in the weed bed.

Everywhere I looked, there was something else for my eye to take in. Of course, the house number slipped by with the house and I kept on going, looking. Two miles further down the road I came to a freeway overpass, buffered by a small gas station. Low on fuel and slightly frustrated by my inability to find Bob’s house I pulled to a pump and put a few gallons in my tank.

It was about lunch time and, since I didn’t know how long my first day at Bob’s would last, I went inside and grabbed an always delicious gas-station pizza (no sarcasm intended). The area I was in is small town…everybody knows everybody. With that thinking in mind, I asked them if they knew Bob.

“He owns a small pig farm out this way.” I showed them the address.

At first it was the half-committal shaking of the head as the wheel started to turn upstairs.

“Wait, you mean the junk farm….excuse me, the farm full of junk?”, she half-ass pointed at me in recognition, a smile crossing her face as opposed to an outright laugh.

“It’s that place?” I asked, pointing out the front windows of the station in the general direction back from where I’d come.

“Yeah. That’s place. I didn’t know about the pigs though.” She looked out the window absently, “I just know that the city has been working on getting that place cleared out.”

Not knowing exactly what to say, I grabbed my pizza and turned toward the entrance, saying, “Thank you”, softly as I headed out the door.

“Wow! So that was Bob’s place.” I said to myself and the empty gas station parking lot as I walked to my car. I opened the door, sat down and took a bite off the tip of the pizza. Two bites later, pizza half gone, I started back across the freeway and down the dusty dirt road towards Bob’s house.

I drove back by the tangles of metal and weeds, looking in my rearview to make sure I could take my time pulling in to the congested driveway and bumped down next to the trucks. I pulled up and found some empty real estate past the trucks, got out, took in the fresh country air and turned to walk towards what I assumed was the front door. No doorbell, I knocked on the door.

After a short wait, the door opened and their stood Bob, shirt unbutton down to his rather generous belly and long gray hairs bustling out of the open collar making me want to comb them. He was backlit by several large blue plastic trash cans. You know, the ones that they use at boat landings and graduation parties. 

He gave my hand an earnest squeeze and invited me in. I don’t know if it’s my ex-wife rubbing off on me, but I used to hang out with a guy, where you went in his house, you had to go through a walkway of newspapers and magazines that lined you path head tall to the couch, where a dirty little open spot would welcome you to sit down. I had no problem with that. But my ex was a germaphobe and she gave it to me.

Once I got inside it really wasn’t as bad as I expected from first looks. It seemed as if having running water wasn’t Bob’s only handicap. He told me that, to save money, he didn’t have trash service but instead would store it in these big plastic cans until he was going somewhere with a dumpster. Who was I to argue.

Standing inside Bob’s house, his mat of stringy white chest hair hanging out of his still half-unbuttoned shirt was an uncomfortable distraction. I averted my attention to the story Bob was unveiling for me about his house, his family and his water situation.

It seems that Bob’s water, because of his perch out in the middle of this arid wastleand, came from a well. The pump that was down in his well had stopped working, so he had it removed and a new one dropped in. This was when Bob’s mom was still alive and, I assumed Bob was still alive too. Loss takes something out of you…never to be found again. This new pump shit the bed in rather quick fashion (a year or two) and despite the money a new pump would cost, he bit the bullet on yet another pump.

The Colorado Eastern Plains are as close to a desert as a desert itself. Because Bob’s house is built on a desert, you have to go down up to 300 ft to find the water table. That’s how deep you have to sink a PVC pipe about the size a baseball in order to drop the pump in with a heavy-duty plastic hose attached to pump water up to the surface. That heavy-duty hose and the pump itself is sent down on a steel cable. So, if the pump goes bad, you bring up the cable and out comes the 300 odd feet of hose with the pump on the end.   

That, at least, is how it’s supposed to work, unless your Bob. His first pump completely broke free from the cable and the hose, a vertical submarine 300 feet down a hole, pointing straight down in to the abyss.

A second pump was brought in, wired up, and after attaching it to the pump hose, sent down in to the hole in search of fresh water. The company that dropped it down had advised against it. “You really need to dig another well,” the technician said. Bob bowed his head, the melancholy sinking through him as deep as the water table itself.

“Do it any way.” He walked over and stared down the black hole, “I have to have water, and I can’t afford another well.”

So, down went the second pump and up came the water. For about a month. Then the new pump stopped pumping. And the water stopped coming.

To top it off, the new pump got stuck down in that hole. I didn’t check it myself. After all, this was all new to me, every last part of his story. Bob said that he had tried to pull the recently submerged pump up and that it was stuck. ”Won’t budge,” he said, matter of fact.  

So, hold your breath, the plan was to first check if there was still water that could be reached and, if it worked out, a third pump would be sent down that well hole. Like I said earlier, I’ve done a lot of different things as a handy man, this wasn’t so strange. Plus, I kind of prided myself in making thing work that others couldn’t or wouldn’t. Granted, it sounded a little on the crazy side, but I wasn’t immune. You know what they…we all get a little crazy in us.

After telling me the story, Bob was finally ready to go; shirt buttoned and socks and boots on. We headed out. Normally my first interactions with clients, I take some time to point out certain things about their house, both interior and exterior, that I could take care of for them. It’s a way of turning small jobs in to bigger jobs. With the open trash buckets inside, the lack of running water I set aside my standard sales pitch. There were years of work at this place, just had to wait and see how things went.

We walked out the front door, concrete block substituting as steps. Can’t be overlooked but around Bob’s farm/car lot/junk yard it didn’t really stand out that much. It had just rained that morning so we started our way down the hill by way of a goat trail, two wheel ruts with waist-high weeds on the outside edge, slightly shorter ones in the middle hypothetically from vehicle traffic.

As we slopped through the mud, we talked about the farm, the vehicle rotting in every open piece of ground, the out buildings checkered along the fence line down below, in an even worse state of disrepair than the vehicles, if that could be believed. The mud road turned and sloped back up towards a green metal gate. That’s when I saw the first of the pigs.

Over the new few days, I learned that Bob’s farm was home to 100 pigs at last count. It started off as just a couple pigs but Bob had let go of his life, and the pig population swelled with his growing apathy.

Bob said that most the pigs, we raised as beef cattle, or in their case, pork. If that makes you squeamish…deal with it. That’s reality. So he raised the pigs to sell, but he was a poor steward and under his lack of attentiveness the pigs would grow too big to garner top dollar on the market. I would have thought that the bigger the better but I guess in the hog business, the young little suckling pigs are the ones that every valued.

Bob had used some chain to keep the gate tight on the distressed post that jutted out of the ground at a 60-degree angle.

“I keep this shut because the pigs like to run.” He led me in to a story about how the pigs would escape and the neighbors didn’t like them because, as I would soon find out, pigs are just as their name would imply…piggish.

We slopped the rest of the way up the hill from the gate. We topped a corner and crested a  small hill where I could take in the chaotic mess of  Bob’s property. Standing on the rise, looking down in to a long swale that ran the length of Bob’s land, there was a very familiar landscape of ratty looking trucks, old cars, tractors and trucks. A smear of mud and squatty little out buildings with ribbed tin roofs dotted the landscape, small walking paths running between them. Like a forest trail cutting through the trees, \ rusted metal, discarded tires and rough razor blades of discarded parts guiding you way.

The pigs were there, all 100 of them, give or take. I would have estimated more but they weren’t my pigs. Bob should know the actual number…or would he. As we looked over this kingdom, Bob starting sharing the details of how things here came to be what they were.

I asked him about all the vehicles. He told me that he had been collecting them for years. It was something he started doing with his father.

“He was a junkman.” Bob said, explaining a lot with those four words. “I’ve been picking up cars and trucks and what-not for over thirty years.”

I had spent some time in the salvage industry. Yeah, I’ve done about everything during my time here on earth. One thing I can never be accused of is having a simple existence.

Having an incomplete knowledge or Bob’s money problems I offered my first piece of advice that was surely going to change his life.

“Bob, why don’t you sell some of these machines out here. You must have a fortune in all this salvage.”

Bob turned away, gestured over the acres of mud and metal out in front of us, “They won’t panything for them. I’ve been collecting for over 40 years, some of these trucks, and tractors are worth more to me than they are willing to give me.”

And there it was. The inability to justify finding the money to pay for a new well hole. The herds of pigs and piglets running around his acreage wild in this rusty metal savanna. Heck, even the fact that he wasn’t about to pay for trash service if he didn’t have to. It’s a thought wrapped with the skin of cheapness but it’s driven by a fear of moving on. Letting go of what has always been—his former life, the one where his parents were still alive.

I mean, this is not the kind of genius that comes at me naturally. In fact it normally doesn’t come to me at all. And I had a job to do. We made a plan. I would come out again tomorrow morning. We would get to the bottom of the well. How that was going to happen I was still working out. After that, we would get to work on getting Bob’s water out of the ground and in to his house.

We slipped our way back through the mud, weaving between the pigs, junk vehicles and fencing overgrown with prairie grass, picking up on more pieces of Bobs menagerie as we plodded back to the front of the house. We agreed upon 9:30 and I got in my car and bounced out of the driveway back on to the washboard heading for home.

Back at my place, I set to devising a way to see what was down in the bottom of that well. I grabbed my old iPhone and plugged it in to the charger. I found a plastic bag that I had purchase several years ago for going down the Colorado River in an inner tube. The bags were heavier than a standard plastic bag and had a waterproof seal. After the phone was charged I dropped in the bag and zipped it shut. Perfect. One well camera ready to go. The only left to round up was some duct tape and I had lots of that.

8 a.m. the next morning broke hot and still, the sun blasting the land like a repugnant laser. As I head towards Bobs, I knew that this was going to be a special day, with stifling temperatures and beating sun, and dirty pigs and mountains of what I had come to conclude was trash. But I couldn’t complain. I had spent the whole winter previous bitching about the cold and promised the Good Lord that if he could get me through this cold-ass winter, I would never complain about the heat again. I was keeping my promise.

I arrived at Bobs, the drive down the dirt road seemingly shorter than the day before. But the pile of trash, rusty reminders of cars and campers, trucks and trailers awaiting the old tires that sat in stacks, felt like it had grown.

I parked, grabbed my homemade well camera kit, and went and knocked on Bob’s door. He didn’t come and I didn’t hear him rustling around inside. I waited and then I decided to walk my way back out to the well and wait. The day had start dry and the mud had officially turned to dirt cakes, wet pieces of mud ripped up by feet and left to clump and harden in the sun.

As I walked down the hill through the junkyard, I had a chance to explore a little more with my eyes than the day before. As I came down the tractor rutted trail, only the hulks of rusty dilapitated and abandoned vehicles provided me with a vantage point to see where I was going. Embarrassing to say, I got lost on my way to the back half of the ranch. Embarrassing because the portion of Bob’s place that I had been through was less than 10 acres, rarely flat, meaning the whole time walking to and fro, with exception to the head-high prairie grass made it fairly easy to see where you were in relation to the house, the green gate and the well. Regardless, at one point I found myself bending down to get under a 53’ trailer and scurrying up a car-sized mound of lose dirt and partially rotted pieces of timbe

After what I would classify as a short-period of meandering (yes, I got lost amongst the junk and weeds) I found my way to the green gate. It struck me as odd that the gate would be slightly open, especially after Bob had emphasized how important it was to keep the gate closed to keep the pigs in. I moved up the rise to the precipice overlooking the outer acres of the land and the pigs mingling down below. I was eyeing the pigs roaming around the vehicle and weeds, running down the still slighty muddy dirt track, when the rev of an engine drawing my attention. I turned my head to the empty field behind barb-wire, an older red tractor working its way south to north up the field, a small two-wheeled trailer being towed along behind.

In the driver’s seat sat Bob, bouncing up and down as the tractor chugged along, his hair wild, and blowing across his head like a mad scientist with a combover. I diverted my attention to out in front of the tractor and understood the reason for Bob’s break neck plunge up the back 40…pigs, one large and one small.

Of course, pig size when it comes to my knowledge base, is only backed by the pigs I’ve seen on television in hunting shows. Oh, and Charlotte’s Web.  Can one count animated pigs as something a person could use to judge pig size. Probably not. This thought drifting away on the rising wind and I adjusted my attention to see Bob closing the gate on the back of the small trailer, two pigs safely stowed away. He climbed back up in the seat, springs giving with his weight. The engine roared as Bob turned the tractor back towards the farm and pulled up next to the barb-wired fence that separated the field of machines, pigs, and weeds from the orderly, if bumpy, pasture his pigs had invaded.

Moving the barb-wire aside, he yelled something at a couple of pigs to shoosh them away from the now open gate, climbed back behind the wheel of the tractor, and pulled through the opening, getting back down to close the opening. I moment later, having let the pigs out of the trailer, he pulled up close to where I was standing, a bemused look.

“Hey. Good morning.” Bob said as he slid down off the tractor. He was breathing hard. For no reason that I could make sense of

“Good morning, Bob. What happened,” I asked?

“Couple of the pigs escaped and I had to go round them up. Neighbors…”, he paused to hack, presumably struggling to catch his breath still, “don’t like my pigs. I think I told you that they’ve caused some problems when they’ve escaped.” He shrugged as he stepped around the front of tractor.

I told Bob what I was going to do as I was doing it.

“Bob. I found some things around.my house that I think will help us figure out what’s going on down there,” I pointed toward the area where the well pipe was, even though it was covered with trash, weeds and dirt.

I held up my iPhone, which I had dropped in to the waterproof bag as I watched Bob loading up the pigs. “I’m going to turn this phone’s video camera on. If you have some twine or thin rope, we can duct tape the phone to the cord and send it down the pipe.”

Bob looked at me confused. He wasn’t following.

“The phone camera will be on.  So, we lower it down then bring it back up and see what we can. Maybe see why the other pump is stuck. Maybe find out that there’s still accessible water down there and then we can just put another pump down.”

 I was shaking my head up and down, trying to sell the genius of the idea. All the time I was thinking that maybe it wasn’t so novel as I had originally thought.

Bob trudged up the hill to where I was standing.

“I have some baling line in the barn, but first we need to get the wiring and the water line cleaned up and ready to go.” He pointed to the trounced-up area all around my feet. I looked down and immediately recognized the heavy, 220-volt wire laying in a tangled mess all over the area where I was standing and probably another 20 feet in every direction.

Mixed in, dirt coated and tangled in the wire was what I assumed was about 200 feet of pump hose, inflexible black water hose that sat on the ground in circles and knots.

When Bob said pigs are messy, I didn’t understand the scope of the mess. Taking in the sheer chaos of wire and water pipe half-buried in this hillside, brought this idea to life in one visual thunderclap.

We set to work. Bob heading off to the barn to get the twine, me down in to the dirt caked tangle of hose and wire.

I started with the wire, grabbing a dirt towel from the bed of one of the smashed-up trucks and pulling free and cleaning off the white insulated sleeve that as I went. The wire ran back and forth along the trod down area in front of the pump. It decided perhaps the best way to skin this cat was to begin pulling the wire down out of the area and loosely coil it up in clean spot away from everything. I had reclaimed about 50 feet of the wire when I saw the top of Bob’s head, his shock of gray hair being whipped by the wind as he topped the crest of the hill.

He came down, breathing heavily at the expenditure of walking to the barn and back on the rough tractor-rutted path. He held up the baling twine, a spool of brown rope a 1/16 of an inch in diameter and plopped it in my hand.

“Here you go. Now show me.”

I unwrapped the cellophane, threw the wrapper in to the truck bed and began lacing the baling line to the waterproof bag. I wound the duct tape around the phone, careful not to cover the camera lens I did so. Since the water pipe already was home to two water pumps, the last thing I need to do was leave my phone down there with it. I took some extra time making sure that the baling line was secured to the bag and that the camera would face down in the hole as it went on its way.

A couple of things I hadn’t anticipated. I had to get the phone powered up and I then had to turn on the phone flashlight, and lastly, turn on the video. None of these proved particularly difficult, but when you’re wound up…and we both were, small delays are exacerbated.

So, with steady-fast nods and stern, determined expressions, we removed the rock, that served as a cover, from the water pipe and began lowering the phone down the tube. As I dropped it, I tried to keep track of how much line I had let down, but I quickly lost count and just kept lower the phone, quickly at first and then more measured as I closed in on what I could only guess was about 150 feet. Both off us were bent over the hole, staring in to the darkness. It must have been a sight….couple dirty old crazy men rubber-necking over a tail of plastic pipe sticking out of the ground.

I turned and gave Bob a sly smile, “I think we are there.”

I pulled and released the twine attached to the phone. It moved back up, but not down. I did it several times, making sure that it had actually found where the two previous water pumps had gotten lodged together in the pole and not just encountered and snag in the pipe, on what I couldn’t even fathom.

Bob gave me a goof look. “Lets get it back up here. See what we got,” he stood up and patted me on the shoulder. So I started pulling up the line, slow at first, faster as I became more confident in the fact that the phone was going to make it back up to the top of the hole. It took forever waiting for that plastic bag wrapped with duct tape to come out and slid over the edge of the pipe and I grabbed hold of it as it cleared the hole. The bag had come back just as it had gone down with one important distinction….it was wet. We had found water in the bottom of Bob’s well.

And this was confirmed when we unwrapped everything and watched the video play back on the phone. As we sent the phone down in to the pipe. We watched as the sun’s rays vanished as the phone slipped down, flashlight illuminating the slick white walls. As the camera kept dropping, the obvious mistake in the engineering of the tape and plastic bag harness revealed itself.

Because the size of the phone was slightly larger than the inner diameter of the pipe, it would skid along those smooth white plastic, catching more and more as it went down. By the time we had gone 1 minute into the two and half-minute video replay, I would figure it was over 100 feet down and pointing almost straight at the wall. No vertical view remained.

Then, at about a minute and 45 seconds, we saw the water, and Bob jerked back, with a hardy, “Whoa!”

I said nothing, still slightly annoyed that I couldn’t see anything down below. Yet still very invested in watching the playback as I watched the water inhale the phone as it continued its journey downward. And then it stopped. You could only guess at how much water table was left in that pipe above the other two pumps, but you had to figure that if there was free-floating water up above the water pump pile-up, that could refill itself at nauseum. So, we watched the camera come back up the line and breach the top of the pipe back into the sun. I stopped the video.

“Well, everything didn’t work according to plan,” I said, “but I think if there’s water up past the old pumps we should be able to get you water working without a new well Bob.”

He nodded, taking it all in. “Yep, there’s water down there. That’s all I need.”

As we sat and relished our success, the sweat forming on the back of my neck, broke up the revelry. The wind that had once kept the day from becoming a bonafide day in the hot, dry desert sun of the Eastern Plains, and I realized that my work for that day was barely started and it was going to take some dirt and sweat to get it done.

“Bob, I’m going to clean and organize the rest of the wiring and then straighten up the pump hose.

“Hey, I can have water by tonight,” Bob said, jumping ahead of himself while absently wringing his hands with the mythical water that remained a couple hundred feet below his dirt clumped boots.

I hesitated, not wanting to say what I had to…because I knew it would disappoint him.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself”. I looked down at the still strewn about electrical cord and the untouched water line. “I still need to get all this wire and water hose straightened up and I haven’t even looked at how we are going to wire it, so I would say tomorrow morning would be a better bet.”

Bob’s eyes followed my gaze and he understood.

“Well. Okay. I can wait another day.” He turned slowly and said over his shoulder as he moved away. “Can I leave you to that? I have to make a couple call up at the house.”

“Sure Bob.” I said. “I’ll get this stuff all straightened out and then tomorrow we can work on getting water pumped to your house.”

As I said that, I noticed maybe a small bounce in his step. Or was that just a misstep caused by a wayward clump of dirt on the trail? Whatever the case, I started back in to cleaning and organizing the strewn electric line and water hose. The day had come hot, once the wind had died away and I spent the next 2 hours sweating, wiping off dirt and straightening the electrical.

Once that was done and I had the electrical organized I moved on to the black plastic water line. I assumed it would be soft and flexible. It wasn’t. Maybe softer and more flexible then black ABS pipe, but certainly not something you could rip through coiling as you went. It was an expanded effort, getting the hose all looped in a fairly accessible coil. It was also around 200 feet long, or at least long enough to connect to the pump down below it had ripped away from as Bob had tried to remove it from the tube. By the time I had finished, hat and shirt drenched in sweat, the muddy track caked around the bottom edge of my boots, black plastic hose spooled around my feet and spreading off in to the weeds in all directions. I worried that once I left the pigs would come back in and I’d spend tomorrow resorting everything. Oh well.

Hot and tired I wandered off up over the rise, through the gate and back up to my air conditioned car.

I made my way to Bob’s again the following morning. Not hot today, just windy. And, Eastern Plain of Colorado is much like other wind-blasted parts of the United States, especially if you have any experience driving across Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas on the right days in the right vehicle to make you appreciate the power of Mother Natures most insidious element. I’ve head it said when someone from Colorado was disparaging our neighbors to the north and east; “Wyoming blows. Nebraska sucks.”

I mentioned before, that in my business, you never know what the day is going to bring when you’re going from job to job, place to place. I’ve been attacked by dogs, even the dogs of clients I’ve had for years. Bitty dogs don’t really need you to be a stranger to give you a good bite. I’ve been sent in to holes where spiders, and mice, and maybe even, rats make their home. I’ve almost electrocuted myself more than once. I’ve had water pipes break free, and things fall apart right before my eyes. Nothing could really compare to Bobs hook up for the electric line that I managed to clean and assemble out of the mud the day before.

Parking my car in Bob’s driveway, I started my way right down through Bob’s land, the wind sawing the long strands of prairie grass back and forth, slapping at the derelict metal that dotted the yard. I didn’t get lost as in previous days. Three days and I was a veteran at working my way down through his land, to the green gate and on to the back acreage, home to hundreds of pigs, stalled in metal round ribbed sheet metal houses.

Bob was waiting in the wind, ducked down behind the bed of one of the smashed up picked ups.

“Hi”, he said, waving his stubby arm in a sweeping gesture. “I got the pump out, so we can hook this up when you’re ready and drop it down the well.”

I could see the pump sitting on the bed of the pick-up. I also noticed where the pump had come from. It had been in the bed of the pickup for who knows how long. The bed of the truck with six inches deep with dirt. The pump, a 18-inch long,cylinder, like a torpedo had been buried in the dirt for who knows how long.

So, what’s the first thing that runs through my mind? Would it have anything to do with the fact that because the pump had been buried in dirt for months, maybe even years and that wouldn’t bode well for success. No, I had never worked around this type of machinery before. I didn’t think anything about it, just happy we had a pump, and were getting closer to touchdown.

Bob pointed back towards a jumbled pile of wood and weeds, a large piece of plywood covering over a spot where, what appeared to be a telephone pole running at a sharp angle in to the ground.

“That’s the electric. You need to wire up this pump and then take the other end over to that electrical pole and wire it into the circuit breaker.” He had to half-yell as the wind had started to pick up his words and carry them off the property. I walked over to where I had laid out the wiring, pleasantly surprised that the pigs had not gotten around to reburying the 300 odd feet of insulated wire.

I brought the wire over to the truck and Bob showed me the wiring connectors went on the pump and then added, “Oh, by the way, do you have any heat shrinks? This wire is going in water, so it needs to be waterproof”.

The minute he said it, I knew what was supposed to be fairly short day, a simple hook up of the pump and on to pumping water. I didn’t have heat shrink fittings which are like boots for wiring. You slip them over the exposed wire, crimp them on a metal loop and screw that loop down on the pump contacts. In plain English, it basically means that I’m going to be running out to the hardware store and hoping to find some heat shrinks big enough for the wire and then make crimps without the help of my crimpers, which was back at my house. Hours of time is another way of putting it, at a time when I was wondering if I was going to get paid for anything I’d done over the last several days….it’s a intuition thing, like a mother’s six sense. People that work in trades can kind of feel when clients are more apt to not pay or pay in fractions. And all these hours just added up to more money invested, and more money no getting reimbursed.