The Spring

As I began to drift off to sleep last evening, thoughts of the old spring on the hillside above the house my parents Sybil and Carl Beck made our home. Two small trickles of water exited the ground several feet apart. They were channeled into the back side of a concrete reservoir about three feet square. It was a low, squat, heavily moss covered bunker with an slightly arched top, a ten be ten inch wooden door, and an overflow pipe that was located just below the door on its front. The back side had an opening to allow the two streams to join, enter, and collect inside.

The spring was almost 300 yards from the brown Insulbrick house and provided the water necessary for our house and the Hall’s our neighbors. Even in the hot summer months, the water was always cold, to the point it could make my teeth ache at times. The flavor, well…it was fresh and refreshing with no aftertaste like my grandparents’ spring. There was plenty of water available year round running clear with enough pressure to service the second floor of our home.

The galvanized pipe eventually filled with corrosion and we had to dig a ditch to hold the new plastic pipe. Because the channel would run through the woods, Dad decided that it would be hand-dug. There were two reasons for that. One was trees would have to be cut to get machinery to the springhouse to dig the ditch. The second was that money was tight and Dad was always looking for ways to save money. Dad would assign a certain amount of the to-be-dug ditch to my brother Ken and me. Dad expected it to be done. One day, we couldn’t complete the assignment. A huge rock was in our way. We couldn’t move it, so we dug the rest of the channel on the other side. Dad wasn’t very pleased to say the least and when he couldn’t dig it out, met the challenge with a sledge hammer. The rock was the size of a wide table top and nearly eighteen inches thick. Dad finally surrendered to the massive boulder and we ran the new pipe under the rock.