There is a pit of anxiety in my stomach as I crack open the last valve on the line and wave at my sister to turn the switch. What if it doesn’t work? What if the pipe explodes in a catastrophic geyser somewhere along the line? What if the pump is a lemon, or the wires are crossed?
Abby flips the breaker and there is a sudden whoosh of PVC glue fumes hissing out of the valve. A good sign. I wait. And wait. And wait. And then faintly, from somewhere in the belly of the mainline, comes a rumble like thunder. It gets louder. I hold my breath. Louder. And then suddenly the water jets out, coughing and spluttering and pulsing until it runs clear and fast, straight up into the hot blue sky as magnificent as the Bellagio fountain, more beautiful than Old Faithful.
It is the best moment ever.
I yell a hallelujah and we all converge in one crazy, happy, relieved high-five fest. I am grinning ear to ear. It feels like anything is possible now.
I run to turn on all the drip lines that I’ve laid out and give a long drink to half the farm.
But the saga is not quite over yet. The other half of the farm is watered with overhead sprinklers, via aluminum irrigation pipes that I don’t own yet.
Enter Allen, our neighbor. I went to school with his nephew, who I remember mostly for his habit of shooting frogs with his BB gun each spring. On his few hundred acres next door Allen runs cattle, works as a logger, and owns a rock pit. He’s been watching my little farm unfold for the past few months and stops now and then to talk through the fence. He’s happy to see some of us local kids coming home and is hoping his daughter will start up her own market garden on a piece of their bottom land.
All week he’s witnessed my race against the heat wave and, unbeknownst to me, he made a few phone calls. Early the next morning, with the temperature already in the 90s, he shows up a with a borrowed 30-foot pipe trailer hooked behind his Ford truck. He’s hunted down a pile of old irrigation pipe that he thinks I might be able to salvage.
I climb into the cab beneath a double-decker gun rack. He blasts the air conditioning, leaving both windows open. “All it takes is one day to make it worth having,” he quips, nodding towards the AC controls while he spits a squirt of chew into the old peach can that he keeps on the dash.
