Drive - A Memoir 44th Installment
and
my welder is getting hotter than the pipe, and we’re going to burn
the cussed thing up!” I was thinking: when
something works Vernon says ‘I,’ and when something doesn’t
work he says ‘we.’
Then he thought of the old well, a sixty foot deep well that used to
have the pump jack on it to pump water. The new water pipe ran
alongside of the old well pipe. He took the cap off the well,
dribbled gasoline down the inside of the pipe, and then lit it
ablaze. As the fire would burn down, one of us would dribble another
cup of gas down the pipe and keep the fire going. Vernon had been out
a long time, mostly without gloves, and he complained, “My hands
are too cold to work, and I’m going in the house to warm up. Keep
the fire going and be careful.”
We
spent considerable time in the cold messing with the fire, pouring
gas down the well, and trying to not set ourselves in flames. At one
point, the fire had receded about thirty feet down the pipe, and Russ
must have thought the lower the fire the more gas was needed. He
flushed about a half gallon of gas down the well all at once. Nothing
happened for a moment, and Russ and I bumped our heads together
trying to look down to see if the fire went out. Then we saw it, felt
it and actually heard the roar of the fire coming up! Russ and I
jumped back just as a column of fire shot out of the well like a
geyser. Cool.
It lasted two or three seconds and went maybe ten feet in the air.
Russ and I looked at each other with toothy grins on our faces and
read each other’s minds. If a half gallon did this, wouldn’t a
gallon or maybe two really shoot a tower of fire out of the well? We
were sure it would, and were ready to try, but noticed Vernon coming
out of the house. We looked back at each other, and I mouthed
quietly, “We’ll burn the well another time when he’s not
around.” It wasn’t much later the water started to drip out of
the hydrant spout, drip, drip, drip. Then a small stream grew, and
finally, we had full stream. It had worked. The remainder of that day
the Old Man made a device; a pipe that would carry the water to the
trough. Because it had a funnel thingy at the top of the pipe, the
pipe would drain, and the hydrant could get air, so the frost–proof
hydrant could drain when the water was shut off.
A
few days later, as Vernon drove out of the lane going to only god
knows where, we gathered up the gallon of gas, matches, and the tool
to take off the well cap. We carefully dribbled the gas down the
inside of
500 more words tomorrow
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