The Stump and Divining the Well

At the time we moved, California was going through one of it’s infamous droughts; the summer was not even half over and water prices were already exorbitant. My father was angered by the spiking of prices for an essential product, not to mention the fact that each member of our family was limited to one shower every other day, and the garden was beginning to wilt. There was an old well out behind Dad’s studio, but the relator told us it hadn’t worked in years. Curious, Uncle C had unscrewed the top of the pump motor, that sat on top of the well, lifted the top slightly, and poked a long, powerful flashlight down the shaft a ways.

“The pump works fine.”, He told my mother as he came inside the house. He’d been tinkering with the well all morning to see what he could do about fixing our water problem. “I’ve taken up all the piping, it’s clean as a whistle, no blockage.” He took a long drink of ice-water and sat down by the kitchen counter. “I think your problem goes further down the well; it must be clogged up, way down where I can’t see.”

Mom didn’t know what to do about that, so Uncle C said he’d ask Dave about different options.

Later, while my Dad was helping Uncle C oil up the pump motor, Dave came walking up the road, about an hour after my uncle had called him. He brought a small, plastic toolbox with him. Jimmy and I went outside to see what Dad would have Dave do; the prospect of having more water was suddenly an exciting thing, after being without the amounts we were used to for three weeks. After the usual nods were given and received, Dave set down his box, carefully, and put his hands in his pockets.

“I can get that well un-stopped for ya.”, he said, in his deliberate way. “Not a problem.”

My father was dubious.

“How?”, he asked, folding his arms over his chest.

Dave put his right foot on top of the box at his feet.

“I got a small charge here...”, he began, watching my Dad’s face.

“Dynamite?!”, Dad exclaimed, his voice rising. “Are you joking?”

Uncle C attempted to pacify my father with soothing words.

“Hear the man out.”, he said, quietly. “He unclogged the Robinson’s well, up the road.”

Dad thought about that for a moment.

“And the well was still intact?”, he asked at length.

Dave nodded sagely, as if he was a professor allowing a young pupil to talk himself into a corner. He explained, calmly, how he went about such a delicate project with such a volatile instrument. The charge, as he said earlier, was very small, as not to damage the walls of the well. Also, he’d lower the charge on what he called a ‘string’ detonator, to get the charge dangling right above the blockage. The amount of technical explanation he shared showed that he’d been around dynamite a long time; also, I wondered how much experimentation had taken place on the hills of Dave’s property to help him arrive at this knowledge.

Eventually, my father’s permission was extracted to do this dynamite deed; even my mother was more for it than against, having had enough of helplessly watching the slow extermination of her new garden. She gathered Jimmy and I in front of the house, fearing that a sinkhole might open up near the well and swallow us. Uncle C gave Dave a hand, though he really didn’t need it. The long detonator was attached to what appeared to be a fifth of a thin, orange cigar; it was carefully lowered over the time period of 20 minutes, until Dave felt it was just in the right position.

The explosion was nothing; merely a ‘pop’, deep underground. Dave withdrew what was left of his frayed detonator, and advised my dad to wait about 24 hours before lowering the pipes back in. He also suggested getting a course filter, to weed out any debris that might be down there, since the well was clogged with something. After the detonation crew had left, my father had to admit that most of what Dave had said made sense.

“Well he knows about dynamite.”, he said, reluctantly bestowing an accolade.

A short trip to town was all that was needed to procure an adequate filter for the beginning of the piping; we waited the 24 hours then lowered the filter down the well, attached to the first section of piping, adding piping slowly, as needed. We only had 120 feet of piping, and as it was lowered it hit no blockages whatsoever. With great ceremony, Dad buried the extension cord to the pump and flicked on the ‘start’ switch. We waited breathlessly, watching the spigot on the side of the pump where one could attach hoses. After a minute, dirty water began to dribble out; the gurgling stream of liquid mud grew stronger and thinned out slowly. After about 20 minutes, clear, beautiful water was streaming out, much to our relief and happiness.

With a small testing kit, my father tested the water’s PH and found it very pure, with no dangerous chemicals or metals. Mom hooked up the hose to it and spent a happy hour giving her Dianthus and ‘sea pinks’ a good bath , not to mention the fading rock roses and lavender bushes. Out of a swelling feeling of gratitude to Dave, my father filled up one of our five gallon water carriers and had Jimmy and I walk it down to Dave’s place. Tickled that his favorite tool had once again worked on a hard operation, Dave tried some of the water and nodded to himself several times.

“I see your dad got a filter.”, he said, emptying our container into his ‘drinking water’ reservoir. “Glad it works. You should have enough water now, right?”

I told him we sure would. He smiled and nodded at us, a signal that the visit was over; he had work to do.

Hauling the empty container back up, we wondered why Dave wasn’t more excited for us. Jimmy suggested that maybe Dave didn’t have enough water. I knew Dave made a quite a nice living for himself with the gold, and would be able to afford an extra well. The next time I visited Jenny I asked her if they had ever considered building a well. She informed me that their property sat on a thick, deep shelf of granite, intermingled with slate and other rock beds. To dig a well through all that would cost more money that they made in a year, and there was no guarantee they’d hit water. Lake Jenny was undrinkable, having been used as a mercury and equipment dump in the ‘olden days’, as my hostess put it.

I told this information to my parents one night at dinner, and they sympathized with Dave’s plight; he had helped us attain more than enough water, after all, with very little trouble or cost to us. So, every time Jimmy and I went down there, we dragged between us the 5 gallon container of water; sometimes Uncle C would bring up some empty milk jugs, fill up a few and take then back down the road. Even with this sharing, we had so much water we couldn’t take enough showers or water the garden enough; that summer ours was one of the few gardens in the area that grew lush and fragrant where other’s withered under the summer sun.

Dave’s water problem solved itself about a month after he fixed our well. Seeking to expand the mine, he and Uncle C had dug off the main tunnel, for a half a day, until they hit a kind of natural rock wall. Exasperated by this blockade to his project, Dave had hurled his pickaxe at the wall in rage; it bounced off and he threw it again. The second time it smashed through the wall, landing on the other side with a ‘splash’. He and Uncle C looked at each other then scrambled for the flashlights. What they had dug up to was another cavern, completely untouched and unseen by man. It was small, and sunken into the ground, but filled with water to a good four feet from the floor.

Not much for exploring the cavern right away, Dave tested the water with a home kit tied to a string and found it a pure mineral spring; it emptied out slowly somewhere, as the water was always moving and fresh. The discovery solved his property’s water problem, and once he hooked up a large PVC pipe and pump device to the new water source, they never lacked for water all the years we knew them. When they had excess, Dave would bottle it up and bring it around to other neighbors who didn’t have as much, just to ‘spread the wealth’, as he put it.

Since Dave now had water, we could enjoy ours with no guilt whatsoever; Mom began planning a Fall flower garden, to plant out behind the house. The terrain was tricky for such a project, due to the incline of the hilly meadow behind the house, but where plants were concerned, my mother had good ideas and lots of stamina. A set of deep terraces was decided on, and various seeds bought. Only one major snag stopped my mother’s plan; right in the middle of her designated space for the new garden was a huge, oak stump, left over from the previous occupant’s attempt at getting firewood.

It was a formidable obstacle...some five feet across, with thick roots sprawling deep into the ground; it proved impervious to all our best efforts to dig it out by hand. To add to the work, the stump had become home to a large colony of slightly irritable red ants, which once took me by surprise one morning by swarming all over me, covering my clothes like paint and leaving a good seventy-plus bites on my legs and torso. The week after Mom had first started to dig up the stump, she grew more and more frustrated, until one day she threw down her shovel and stormed up the hill to the house. After a long shower she was more composed, and served dinner quietly that evening.

Jimmy, in his innocent way, suggested that Dave blast the stump out, saving us the trouble of future digging. I jumped to reinforce this idea, not just because I wanted to see such a spectacle, but I was throughly sick of dragging a shovel down to the stump after school and toiling at a seemingly endless project. To our surprise, my mother was not horrified by the idea, but seriously considered it. After all, she told us, while we were doing dishes, Dave had done a ‘super job’ with the well, and had also showed he could restrain his urge to create large blasts. The next day, she informed my father that she wanted Dave to blow the stump out of the yard.

Doubtful of the outcome of such a thing, but at the same time not wanting to interfere too much with Mom’s project, Dad allowed himself to be swayed by her arguments. He called up Dave and said that he wanted to hire him to blow the large stump out of our backyard. Dave seemed excited by the idea.

“Oh, I’ll do it for free.”, he said. “I need some practice on stumps anyway.” My father should have seen this eagerness as a warning, but thought nothing of it. He set up the blast appointment for the following afternoon at four PM.

Dave arrived right on time, accompanied by his plastic toolbox, several rolls of detonation wire and a small wooden box. His grin was unusually noticeable amid the black beard, and he asked where ‘the victim’ was. The stump was a good thirty feet from the house; it sat resolutely in it’s place, defying all who’d attempt to remove it. Dave walked around it several times, silently scrutinizing each angle, rubbing his beard thoughtfully. My dad’s art deadlines forgotten, the whole family stood about 20 feet away, an involuntary interest in this process keeping us there.

Opening his toolbox, Dave pulled out several quarter-sticks of dynamite, stacking them beside him on the ground. I counted fifteen, but I may have missed one or two. Taking a long piece of thin, metal pipe, Dave bored holes deep into the ground at an angle under the stump. Taking each stick of TNT separately, Dave wired it and carefully pushed it deep into the soil.

“That’s...quite a bit of dynamite.”, my father said, uncertainly to my mother.

“I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”, Mom whispered, patting his arm. Still, Dad had us scoot back another ten feet, up against one of the pine trees at the edge of the back clearing.

Having finished the wiring, Dave reeled the spool of detonation cord all the way back to where we were, to about seven feet in front of us. He then left, walking back up to his Jeep; he came back with first one old, queen-size mattress, then another one.

“I get these at the dump.”, he said. “They’re good for keeping pieces of rocks and stuff from breaking your windows.” Wincing a little, Dad told him that was a good idea. With a precise throw, Dad planted the mattresses onto the stump, one at a time, then walked back to where his toolbox and ‘detonation station’ was, by us. The wooden box then came into play; squatting down near the ground, the stump removal specialist picked up the box, cradling in his hands.. Threading the cord and other wire through small holes in the box, he stripped down the wires with oily wire-cutters and placed them near to one another. Looking back at us, he grinned encouragingly and said,

“All set?”

We were set, but maybe not quite ready for what happened when Dave touched the wires together.

The ‘boom’ was only slightly muffled, but loud nonetheless; the blast didn’t knock us over, or even shake us that much. It was the aftermath that was awesome to behold: a swirling, giant, opaque cloud of dust bloomed from the ground and washed over us, much like a large wave of seawater. Bits of grass and root fell around us, shreds of mattress landed on our dust-covered heads and shoulders in a very undignified manner. After a moment, we cautiously opened our eyes and watched the dust settle. Where the stump used to be, once so rebellious and stubborn to our persuasive shovels, was a huge crater, some seven feet deep and nearly ten feet wide. Pieces of mattress were spread far and wide, but there was no sign of the stump.

About to ask where the stump was, I was deterred by the sound of a deep ‘thud’ to the right of our little group. We all looked over towards the sound and involuntarily took a step back; there was the stump, a mere seven feet away from us, in almost a whole chunk, it’s underside smoking and the partial roots quivering up at the sky in some contorted show of agony. Dave pushed his hat back off his forehead with a whistle.

“Now there’s a sight.”, he said, pleased with himself. “Nice distance.”

In spite of the dust-storm and near brush with being squashed, there were quite a few good things that came of the project. Mom got her garden space and Dad had good oak roots for the fire that winter. Mom filled in the hole with several loads of dirt and potting soil, and planted a white peach tree in the hole, which flourished beautifully over the years. As for the ants, we never found even one; they had been totally obliterated by the blast. And best of all, Dave was temporarily satisfied in his craving for explosions.

A few months later I happened to meet a county geologist at one of my parents social gatherings, and queried him on the ‘operation stump’; I found out that half the amount of dynamite used would have been sufficient, but the flamboyance of the ‘show’ would have been considerably less.