Fount of Every Blessing
- Barry Helm
- Sep 12, 2021
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 12, 2021
I never intended to write a post about the landscaping in my yard. Part of the reason would be the embarrassment I feel over not having completed this task, though I have had over four years to do so. Another reason is that I do not see myself as a landscape blogger (and sometimes I feel calling myself a landscaper is a stretch, or a blogger for that matter). However, given the nature of a recently completed feature in our yard, I thought that there would be some people who would interested in learning a bit more about this project.
The project: converting an antique mechanical water-well pump into a landscape feature.
A Funeral and Discovery Tour
In 2004 my mom’s brother, Uncle Fred, passed away and our family traveled to eastern Saskatchewan for the memorial service. Though trips to the farm where my mother grew up were once common, they had become rare. And this was an opportunity to reconnect with family whom we had not seen in years and introduce some of my nieces and nephews to several relatives. It was also an opportunity to visit the farm where my mother grew up, just a few kilometers northwest of Carrot River, SK.
The farmhouse (still standing), was where my Grandmother and Grandfather raised their eight children. For many years, this humble, less than eight- or nine-hundred square foot home had no electricity, an outhouse for toilet facilities, and running water meant running outside to get it from the hand-operated piston-style pump. (This pump required the operator to move a lever up and down to draw water from the well below.)
Visiting the farm and the house evoked a flood of memories of visits there as a child. And it curious how scent and memory mingle as they do. I recall the smell of dewy grass in the morning as I sprinted barefoot to the outhouse with its own not-pleasant-but-not-as-terrible-as-one-may-imagine outhouse-y smell. I recall the old barn full of curiosities and its smell of musty hay, old leather, and stale gasoline. I recall the bright smell of freshly harvested dill and chopped onion as Grandma Dora prepared beet borscht. And I recall the trap-door in the middle of their linoleum covered living room floor. It frightened me. Once lifted, it was precariously propped open with a skinny stick, like a mousetrap built for overly curious and careless children. The gaping hole revealed a set of steep, well-worn, wooden steps that led to the cellar below – a room that housed foodstuffs and other items that I was too afraid to explore more fully for fear of living out the Joseph-cast-in-the-pit-by-his-brothers story. The smell of that cellar is unforgettable; it smelled like, well, potato cellar.
So many of these submerged memories bubbled to the surface as our family continued to wander around the farm.
Walking to the edge of the yard, we spotted the old threshing machine in the tangled grip of lazy willow trees and the aspirations of clamoring young maples. The threshing machine was our playset when we were kids. It was much larger back then -- back when I, along with siblings and cousins would crawl on and inside this sleeping beast exploring its guts of sprocket and chain. Garbed in galvanized steel, iron gears, and weighty wheels, this once-proud triumph of harvesting technology was now adorned with accouterments of moss and lichen and twigs and decaying leaves. I am certain she would have wisdom to share with those who have ears to hear it.
Near the threshing machine we stumbled upon the old hand-operated water pump. Having been replaced by an electric water pump years ago, it was now nestled in the long grass, lying in sweet repose. Its fate would likely have been the revocation of its identity by the recycler’s fiery crucible or the earth’s oxidative forces.
I asked my Uncle George who was guiding us on this tour (and who cared for the house and farm), if I could have the pump. He answered in the affirmative and this small piece of family history made the journey back to my parents’ farm near Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. It remained in storage, hidden behind an old wooden granary and under the watchful boughs of a row of spruce trees that caringly began to encapsulate it a coniferous quilt of fallen needles over the next seventeen years.
The Opportunity & Process
There is a certain irony that, in the summer in which we have been experiencing drought in western Canada, I would rediscover the pump. The drought, having slowed my landscaping business, enabled me to clean up around my parents' yard. During the cleanup process the pump was rediscovered and with some free time on my hands I brought it into the shop with a vision to give it new life.
I carefully buffed the loose surface rust off and discovered that some parts still had signs of the green paint it once bore, but most of its cast parts were a lovely blend of deep rust and silvery zinc. To preserve the patina, I protected it by spraying on a few layers of clear coat paint. The original wood handle had disintegrated into a dry fibrous dust, so my father fashioned a new handle from a fir 2x4. Then I fabricated a base for mounting the pump from rough-hewn planks which had been salvaged from some unknown source. Once assembled, I set it up in my backyard on a plastic basin and covered the basin with rock. It was then connected to a small pond pump that would lift water up the main pipe and discharge it out the spout where it would flow back into the plastic basin thus creating a recirculating fountain.
I was pleased with the results: From this forgotten pump, water flowed once again.
And it had stories to tell.
Hearing the Voice
Upon close inspection one can see where a nail was used to make a repair for a pin that broke or went missing.
And someone had patched and welded a section to make the pump operable once again.
The day the pump broke would likely have been a stressful one for my grandparents who depended on this fixture for the watering of children and livestock. For them this pump was not a landscape feature. It was survival. It was life.
My imagination drifts further back to the when my grandfather dug the well for the pump. Days of digging by hand. What did he think as he first set boot-to-spade-to-soil, breaking netted turf? How did he feel as he dug and dug and dug, deeper and deeper below the surface, slowly becoming hidden at the bottom of the deep, cool, discomforting confines of an earthen shaft? As he shoveled scoop by sticky-soil scoop, was he tempted to give up? What drove him: Duty? Survival? Hope? Love? And how did it feel when he witnessed the earth concede its treasure as water began seeping into the well? And then, climbing out of dim-tomb to eye-blinking-brilliant sun-soaked blue sky, profound joy must have saturated his heart. Sharing the news with his wife and children, I imagine that his stooped back straightened and the pain of blisters faded when his family tasted the first bucket of sweet water.
Nostalgia & Legacy
Setting up this fountain in my yard is about more than the construction of a landscape feature. It is more than a stagnant nostalgia that tends to look longingly over its shoulder at good-ole-days now gone; and it is more than a nostalgia that attempts to moor the present in the silty riverbanks of memory, only to drag anchor in time’s relentless current.
No, salvaging this pump is not about nostalgia. It is about recognizing that from a well and through this pump, life flowed, both for my forebearers and, in a very real way, for me. This life-giving water flowed not because of my efforts, but because of the efforts of those who went before me. The fountain is a testament: I am here because of the faithful perseverance, hopeful endurance, and loving diligence of others. I am called to honor that legacy.
So at the end of a long day filled with too much hurry and too much worry, the Fountain beckons me to sit. And to observe. And to hear the stories. Stories that remind me of a legacy that has flowed freely to me, and to honor that legacy by refreshing others with the same faith, hope, and love. ◊
I really enjoyed it! Brought memories back from my day. - Grandma Lorna
This is a beautifully written piece. 😊