Bringing Drinking Water Home

            A red pitcher pump beside the kitchen sink was the only plumbing in our house in Whitney Valley, in Northeastern Oregon. We hand pumped water into the kitchen sink from the shallow well under the house for our baths, for washing dishes, and all other needs except drinking. The strong taste of sulphur and iron algae in the water discouraged us from drinking water from our well.

            Filling our water jugs in the small town of Sumpter, thirteen miles over Huckleberry Pass, combined well with visiting friends and family, stopping for the mail, and doing laundry.

            Antler Guard Station, down North Fork Road two miles from us, had a small cabin, kept in good shape by Forest Service workers. We filled our drinking water jugs from a deep-well hand-operated pump in the front yard. Cold water that missed flowing into jugs liberally splashed laughing pumpers in hot summer sunshine.

            Getting water was never a time just to fill jugs and go. We looked into the cabin through the windows again, even though the inside didn’t change from one water-getting trip to another. New flowers blossomed in grasses heading up for seed. Juniper and Amanda climbed the split rail fence and talked about T.H. White’s books.

             The river ran close to Antler Guard Station. Though it was generous to call it a river in the low water time of summer, it was a place to explore, to invent adventures, and to imagine. Steep bluffs rose across the river from the guard station. I wasn’t there the day Jim went along and showed the rest of my family how to climb several hundred feet up to the cave in the bluff and how to run, almost safely, back down the very steep ridge, but I enjoyed the excited recounting of the experience afterward.

            Sometimes, we got our drinking water from Logging Camp Spring, two miles up the ridge from Antler Guard Station. We rarely saw anyone else up the steep gravel road, except deer, elk, marmots, ground squirrels, and many different birds. A stout split-rail fence enclosed the spring. Water flowed from the spring through a pipe into a large trough outside the fence, where animals could drink and people could fill white one-gallon plastic bottles.

            We talked together about the elk who lived in the Blue Mountains and drank from this trough, about cabbages and kings, about green moss growing in three feet of water in a green metal trough. I said, “Rick and Gwen bring their watermelons up here and float them in the trough all day. This water is cold enough for a cold melon.” The smell of cool air moving across cold water lingered around us in shade beside the road.

            In a long-ago logging camp, so many nails had been driven into trees to tie clotheslines to, to hang pots and pans, to hang tools from, that loggers after that wouldn’t cut into the trees for fear of hitting nails with their saws, and a small area of old-growth fir and western larch grew across the road from Logging Camp Spring.

            The four of us walked between tall trees and out onto the top of the bluff and looked at Whitney Valley spread green, far below our feet, our house way down there, two miles from us. Close around our feet, small chunks and larger chunks of petrified wood, once buried, now eroded from the soil. Living trees, currant bushes, rabbit brush, with yellow flowers, bunch grass, wild flowers close against the ground grew around us.

            Two miles down the river from Antler Guard Station, a small spring emerges from the stone ridge rising above the road. It was harder to fill the water jugs there, but water cress grew profusely where the water flowed in the borrow pit above the road. Peppery green leaves added interest to our diet. We ate some of the spicy plant right there in the cool beside the road while we looked down on old growth western larch and willow bush along the river. We took some home with us and mixed it into a salad of greens harvested from our garden.

            Did we need animal cookies? Off to Austin Junction. We filled our jugs from a very cold, clean spring that delivered water down a plastic pipe almost to the shoulder of the highway. We drove a mile beyond the spring to a small country store. Juniper and Amanda bought a small box of animal cookies each, enough to last them a week or more.

            Every time our supply of drinking water ran low, we faced an exciting conference when the four of us decided, which of our several sources for water do we visit today? What rules our exploration today, the need for human companionship and laundry, water cress, the view from Logging Camp? Or will we play and explore along the river? How long since anyone had animal cookies? We loaded the jugs and four humans, sometimes one dog, into the pickup and drove away for the adventure of the day, for clear, clean water to drink for a week.