Wells to me have always been a source of fascination, mystery, and fear. Places where an unsuspecting walker deviating from the usual path stumbles into an abandoned well, where a child on a dare looks too close and tumbles forward, where a wandering dog disappears forever, where a body is thrown with disregard.
The well of my childhood was old but in use. Its cover was wood, easy to remove one supposes. With its aged, cracked boards, I remember feeling anxious around it though it was perhaps no more dangerous than the holes in the floor of the hay mow or walking home from public school, alone, along the half mile plus gravel road while my two brothers ran ahead.
The cover of the well came off only when there was a lack of water. This could happen in summer or winter and my father would stand and lower a bucket on a rope down, down to draw up water. My brothers and I were allowed to step in for a look, to see the dank dripping brick walls and its seemingly impenetrable bottom. To my child’s mind, it was bottomless. To my adult mind, it is still unknowable. How was it dug out and bricked? Do the bricks go all the way to the bottom? Cover the floor? How does the water get in and out? And stay in?
Years later, a new well was drilled. This was when my brother who lived at home as a young adult saw fit to throw a pile of rocks down the old well, for what purpose I remain unclear. However, it has created an enduring family legend. Another brother is convinced that one of the rocks, disregarded for years as it sat beside the barn, is in fact a meteorite. Worth, of course, considerable money.
We will never know. The well was finally capped with concrete, covered in sod, and surprisingly, the little fir tree planted on the top, took root and flourished. Those who own the property now are doubtless unaware of the site of the well.
The new well is in essence a very long pipe within a cylinder, measuring only six inches in diameter. It goes down an impressive two hundred and sixty-five feet. No one will ever talk about the new well.
But the old forty foot well lives on in my memories and imagination. Now awe and gratitude sit beside fear. That well watered a barn full of cattle and a few pigs. It serviced our large household for many years and let us down relatively seldom. One time, perhaps not surprisingly, was the winter my father welcomed an old army buddy and his family to share the upper floor of the house until they found permanent shelter, after making a disasterous and failed trip to start a new life in Mississippi. Family photos show the two men hauling water, standing over the well, covered with snow. It speaks much about my father.
I like the mystery of the well. I suppose I could research its construction but I prefer to think of men over a hundred years ago digging with hope in search of water, life sustaining, part of a long history of human need and symbolic endeavour.
There must be many of these old wells, hidden, water still ebbing and flowing into them, breathing like a pair of lungs, destined to play out their secret lives for another hundred years or more.
