More Ranch Work, plus some difficulties.

We dig dig dig in our mine the whole day through... Spent all day digging down by the water pump house. It feeds several water tanks for the herds plus the house.

Unfortunaetly there's been some sort of problem. It could have been a leak or maybe the spring frost buckling the pipes, but there is drainage, enough to completely drain the water tanks and the house dry if we're not careful. We're now having to split our water with the herds. We can deal with it, they can't.

So I, the tenants down the road and my grandfather have spent the day digging around trying to find the source of the problem. A ditch a good ten feet deep is made before we find the pipes, and in each ditch there is no problem. Grandpa's said "screw it" and has decided to just replace the entire damn system. There will be no regular water for up to a month while he gets the needed supplies and manpower to uncover the entire pipe system here in the valley and install the new one. Between then and now we will be having fresh water only intermittently, a few hours each day. There's an outhouse and a creek behind the house we can use, and the washing machines will be used only sparingly, if at all.

I am told that grandad has lived this way for a good third of his life, in the Alaskan wilderness, in the Colorado Rockies, out hunting, and growing up on the farm near Elko.

Makes one feel a bit.... hum, ashamed isn't the right word. Well, self-aware. I'm the quintessintal city-slicker, and from what I've heard grandad's the last fricken Jeremiah Johnson-esque Mountain Man In Existence.

Well no frickin' bloody wonder the man's so damn hard-core.

Here's a couple excerpts from his fledgling auto-biography, which he wants me to edit:

...At the end of the school year, when I was in fifth grade, my father dad told me I was old enough to start working. He told me that I had to come down to the plumbling shop and answer the telephone and put away plumbing fittings. I was paid .25 an hour... After I got out of seventh grade, dad put a shovel and a set of pipe wrenches in my hands. I either worked with the well drillers or the laborers... I would spend more than half the summer with the laborers. I took pride in working hard, having the sweat pour off of me, and keeping up with the man at my side. Half-way through this second summer of working, I turned 15 and got my driver's liscense. By this time it was evident trhat I could keep up with any of the adult men digging. I went to my father and asked him what Nick and Eddie were making an hour.

... at least 2.50 an hour. I told him that if I could work just as hard and do as much as they could, it was fair that I made the same amount of money. So it was that at age 15, in 1958, I was taking home $100 a week...