The Well

 Whenever I go to our kitchen sink to get some water for drinking or for cooking purposes, I often pause and reflect on how thankful I am for the ease with which I can access potable water within the confines of my home. It was not always like this. On the farm where I grew up, we did not have electricity or running water. To get a drink of water, I would get my drinking cup from a shelf above the pail that held our supply of drinking water. The pail was set on top of a wooden stand about a half of a metre high. Beside the pail was a dipper hanging from a hook. We used the dipper to scoop water from the pail. I must confess that often when no one was around I would simply dip my cup into the water without using the dipper.

The water was usually at room temperature so the only way to enjoy cold water was to go fetch a new “pailful”. That was my job. Or my mom would let me know when the water pail needed refilling.

I would take the pail and empty any water left in it into a large kettle on our wood burning kitchen stove. Then I would take the empty pail to the well which was about 50 metres from the house or about halfway between our barn and our house. This leads me into the history of this particular well.

A favorite method of finding well water in Saskatchewan in the 1950's was to hire a dowser. When construction of the new #10 highway in Saskatchewan in the 1950's caused us to lose our existing well to the bulldozers who were widening the ditches and raising and widening the existing old roadbed, we were forced to try and find a new source of water on our property.

Mike, our neighbour to the north, was our local dowser. He offered to find water for us for free when he heard that we had lost our well to progress, the new highway.

He walked the area with his "witching" rod, a freshly cut branch from a diamond willow tree shaped like the letter "Y". The butt was about two feet long as were each of the arms. In the area which we felt would be the best location, he paced a grid in patterns. Every once in a while, the end of the "Y" would bend downward, and he would mark the spot. How he would mark it depended on how strong a pull he felt. After he had walked the entire area where we wanted a well located, he made a suggestion as to where he thought we should dig.

We then hired the services of a well-digger, who with his large well auger, bored a hole that was about 30 feet deep and about 4 feet in diameter in the spot Mike had designated. Water started to seep in almost immediately.

My father and I had constructed eight well cribs out of rough lumber. These cribs were 3 feet in diameter and in 4-foot sections. These would then be dropped into the well, one at a time, each one resting on the preceding one.

The first step was getting a person that was the right size to be able to descend into the well and still be able to move their arms to work freely. That was me! My dad tied a rope securely around me in the form of a harness and, using a block and tackle mounted on a tripod over the well, he would lower me into the well.

The harness served several purposes. The first was to be able to pull me out quickly should I encounter "poison gas", possibly methane, or "bad air" at the bottom of the well. Air without oxygen is what I think it was. You could tell when the bad air was there, because when you went down in the well, you would have a hard time getting your breath. Another reason was to be able to pull me out should the sides of the well collapse onto me while I was down there. The third reason was as a precaution from falling from the different levels of cribbing as I worked on them after they had been lowered.

My first job after my descent into the well was to clean up the bottom of any debris that had been dislodged in the digging process. When I got to the bottom, the first thing I did was to look up at the patch of blue showing at the top of the well. Rural myth had it that one could see the stars in the daytime from the bottom of a well. That was one rumor that was quickly disproved and put to rest.

I used a square ended spade to place the mud and dislodged stones into a bucket which had been lowered down to me. When the bucket was full, I signaled, and the bucket was raised by means of another pulley system that had been set up. I had to hug the sides of the well as the bucket went up because this was in the days before hard hats were the norm and I didn't want to be hit in the head by any falling objects...especially falling pails full of debris!

When the bottom was clear of debris, I was hoisted to the surface. By now there was about a foot of water in the bottom of the well. When I was clear, my dad and I lowered the first crib into the well. Then I was lowered again to undo the rope from the crib and to make sure that it was fitting snugly and resting on an even keel. I would be hoisted up again, but from a few feet higher than I was before, as I was now standing on the first crib. This was repeated until all eight cribs had been placed.

Then with a safety rope tied around my waist, I "monkey" crawled down to the bottom. I had with me a hammer and nails. I then secured the bottom of each crib to the top of the preceding one. This took about 5 nails at each crib joint. The last crib would be sticking up a few feet above the ground. It would be extended about a foot or to a height to allow for easy action on the pump handle.

The well would be topped off with a deck with a swinging trap door. This was to accommodate buckets which could be used to lower food down to the water level where the cold well water would keep it fresh longer in the summer heat in the days before electrification and refrigeration.

The next step was to insert a pipe that was about 3 inches in diameter to reach about to a foot from the bottom of the well. To the pipe that was sticking above the deck, a pump was attached and then secured firmly to the deck. The well would fill to the height of the water table with cold fresh clear water filtered naturally by the gravels and clay it had passed through.

Then we would fill in the spaces between the cribbing and the sides of the well with clean gravel. This was tamped down and the well would now be secure. We then built up the soil around the well in a slope with hard pack gravel which would divert any surface water from finding its way into the well.

The last step was to pump the well free of all water to remove any sediment which had seeped in through the cribbing during the process of building and packing. When the water ran free of sediment, the well was allowed to fill again. A sample of water was taken and tested in the city to make sure of its purity for human consumption. If it was, and it was, then we had a usable well!