The First No Well

I like Christmas music. We've been playing it for a couple weeks in our house and cars, but we're not yet playing it in the halls at school. We wait until after Thanksgiving for that--no point in getting the kids ready for Christmas Break too soon.

In the years following 1970, I used to sing the Christmas chorus "The First Noel" this way: "No well. No well. No well. No well. How can we get water if there's no well?"
I meant no disrespect to the original words; it's just that I was warped by our "no well" experience in 1971.

When you hear the word WELL, what image comes to mind? A quaint little "wishing well" with a bucket on a rope wrapped 'round a wooden crank? A farm well--the kind with rusted windmills that still stand against the big Midwestern sky? Do you think of a scary movie or a song "'bout a ghost in a wishing well"? Or of abandoned pits like the one down which “Baby Jessica” fell in 1987?



I'd almost forgotten about her. Like nearly everyone in America, we were glued to that "baby-in-the-well-drama" for two nights, and the viewership paved the way for what networks would later called "reality TV." But I digress...

The purpose of this post, like the one about cisterns, is to lay some groundwork for the "Unsettled" chapters that will follow. I plan to write those in story form so it may make more sense if we have this discussion first.

There are basically three ways to excavate a well (double-click picture to enlarge) : A well can be (1) drilled, (2) driven (sometimes called a "driven-point well" common here in the sandy soils of west Michigan), or (3) dug--as in hand dug with a shovel. When I think about wells, I think about digging.

Through the years when I've told people "we dug a well with dad" they envision one of these methods, and the truth is what we did looks closest like the drawing on the left of the diagram above, but it was a little more complicated than that. This is obviously not my dad in the video, but this is very similar to the space in which he worked.



The workers in the video above were digging and then pouring cement around the inside bottom of the well as they dug. They had not yet hit water, but every time they had a foot or so of exposed earth under the concrete wall, they lowered buckets of concrete to "add more wall" at the bottom as they gradually went deeper.

Wells like this old one, were dug first and then the masonry work was built from the ground up inside the dirt hole.

This was the method most commonly used throughout history. If you have the time, you can see how it's done in this seven minute video. The labor involved in this sort of well is even harder than what we did with Dad, whose idea was unlike anything I've seen done anywhere else.

I wish we had some video of Dad down in the well and my brothers and I hauling up 5-gallon buckets of dirt and clay. I'd settle for some photographs, but the truth is during the nearly ten weeks of digging the well. We took no pictures. When we first bought the land, Mom took lots of pictures. (I've shared many of them in previous chapters.) But by '71, she had grown somewhat weary of the slow progress we were making out at "the property." Oh, she was still very supportive and brought out hot meals for us every Saturday, but in the two years since the barn had been completed, all of our Saturday work was on roads and creeks and "infrastructure" such as electrical and excavation for where the house would someday be, but there was no sign of a house.

Add to this the fact that my sister Kathy had gone away to college during the 1970-71 school year, and parting with kids for college has a way of making parents feel old, and the place you live, because it becomes the place children "come home to" feels more and more like where you ought to stay. Mom never said this aloud, but it was part of her mixed feelings about moving and the slow pace of our hard work.

There was much more involved, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Suffice to say that during those years Mom took fewer pictures. So these images and videos from third-world countries are very helpful.

See the men rolling the concrete culvert in the photo above? Our project, when I get to that part of the story, began with seven culverts just like that, and by the end of the project they looked like this. How we got there, I trust, will be as interesting to you as it was memorable for Dad, my brothers, and me.