By the end of the 1920's my Dad was old and sick. His older boys were doing the farming. Everyone worked very hard but the cold reality of the situation was that work was not enough to provide what we needed to survive. We had to have water for the family as well as for the livestock, chickens and turkeys. We spent the months of July and August just looking for a cloud in the sky that might develop into a shower of rain. Most of the time it didn't rain. The scorching heat burned the ground, the living plants, and your feet if you were barefooted.
On the long hot afternoons of the Oklahoma summers, Dad would sit in the shade of the south porch trying to capture any cool breeze that was blowing across the mesquite tree pasture. We are talking about a time before electric fans, air conditioning or weather reports. To keep cool, you sat in the shade, with a wet towel around you neck and fanned with an old piece of cardboard.
Sometimes the wind didn't blow for several days. The skies were clear blue from horizon to horizon. The heat of the sun was scorching and life became almost motionless. Without wind we would run out of stock water in the pasture. We waited, breathlessly, for just a little wind to run the windmill. There were other times when we lived with the roaring wind, the blowing sand and the searing summer heat. We recognized the clouds that would bring rain, heard the crackling of the lightning and thunder that brought hail to destroy your crops, felt the warm summer rains that relieved the heat and learned the dangers to anticipate when we had an afternoon thunderstorm that could turn into a tornado.
Many days in the summer there would not be a breathe of wind. If the wind came up in the afternoon we knew this was our signal to fill the cow's water tank while the wind was blowing. Dad would get up from his old rocking chair, walk about 200 yards to the windmill, lift the lever off the peg, let the wind hit the fans and immediately the wheel began to spin. The working innards of the windmill was the sucker rod and a few cog wheels that began a pumping motion, up and down. In a few minutes there was water coming through the pipes from the bowels of the earth where God kept this liquid even if it was sour, bitter and unpalatable to humans. The cows and horses seemed to know by instinct that they had to drink it or starve to death and when they were thirsty enough they stood at the tank and drank until they had their fill. If the wind lasted long enough we would get the stock tank full of water.
As the wind died down in the late afternoon Dad would walk back along the cow trail through the mesquite trees to the windmill, pull the lever around and tie it down with a wire so that if a high wind came up during the night the fans would not be torn off the fan.
Today, you can still see the old iron windmill standing in our Horse Branch pasture. It is just a rusty piece of junk that looks more like a metal sculpture than a machine used to pump water, but it still fills my mind with boyhood sounds, smells and taste. When I visit the old home place, just seeing the old windmill tower makes my taste buds begin to pucker as if I had taken a taste of that gippy water.
We had to use heavy axle grease to keep it lubricated but it still acted as if it were an angry monster at times. When the wind broke the lever loose we knew it from the sound that came on the wind. Someone had to run down to stop the wheel from being torn apart by the high winds.
I don't have to see that old windmill to remember it. I can close my eyes and open my heart and I can hear that old grinding sound of the rusty metal rubbing together and the wheel swings in the wind. Today that is a sweet memory that I cherish from my childhood.
