I want to preface this entry by saying that I did not have a horrible childhood, it was alright. That being said there were some questionable ideas that were developed in the Hale household. This is a little story about one of them. First off, we did not live out in the middle of nowhere, in some remote location seldom frequented by civilized human beings. We lived just outside the city limits, and had a city water supply. We also had a well that was used strictly for irrigation so my parents water bill would stay low. In addition we did not live on some large farm or ranch. We had a house on a large city lot. One day, when I was about 12 or so, my father announced to the family that the well was running dry, but never fear, he had developed a plan to save the Hale household's water bill. He was going to send my brother and I down the well to start digging. To me this was not nearly as great a plan as I think he thought it was.
Now the well was approximately 40 feet deep or so and there wasn't a whole lot of elbow room around a kid when he was down it. My father's awesome idea was comprised of a large "A" shaped steel thingy-ma-bob that went from the ground and leaned at an angle against the house. On the big "A" there was mounted a hand crank winch with a cable. At the end of the cable was a wooden seat like a swing set seat. This was the contraption that lowered me down the well. As far as I know ther were no buried bodies, giant naked mole rats, or Creatures from the Black Lagoon, but those are the kind of things a kid thinks about when he is being lowered down a pitch black well. My equipment included a hard hat with a regular flashlight duct taped on top, A rain coat, and a tall pair of rubber boots. While I was down the well a plastic 5 gallon bucket was lowered with a shovel that had part of the handle sawed off because there just wasn't room for a regular legth shovel down the well. I spent hours digging and filling the bucket which was pulled up when full, bouncing off the sides of the well all the way up, knocking rocks back down on me. But I had my hard hat.
This went on for some time; it seemed like years, but was really just most of the summer. One day while my dad was at work my mom lowered me down the well and the winch came off the crank and I was stuck half way down the well. My mom ran and got some neighbors, it turned into a real "boy trapped in the well" situation. One of the neighbors was able to fix the winch and get me out. You might think that would be a moment to ponder an end to the children down the well situation; nope, I was down the well the next day. After a summer of digging we were allowed to stop, I don't feel like we made a whole lot of headway on the well, but hey, now I have an interesting story to tell.
OMG this is the BEST story! It leads to so many more questions though, did you save the family water bill, did the neighbors want to hire you, do you ever think of swinging in a dark tunnel just for fun, was it wet down there and do you want to dig out my cellar, I've been thinking about putting in a swimming pool? Isn't great how resilient kids are to overcome their parents best ideas!
ReplyDeleteYou telling this story to me on our first date was that moment when I realized that the date was either going super great or horribly awry, because I couldn't stop laughing. I figured you'd either appreciate my tasteless jokes about what could have been in that well, or you would think I was a horrible person for mocking one of the most traumatic events of your childhood. I'm glad to see that it was the former rather than the latter. We ROCK!
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