When conveniences become inconvenient

We live with many conveniences today, more than we commonly appreciate. Conveniences easily come to be taken for granted. We just assume they are there for us, and if circumstances take a turn to deny us those conveniences, we get upset. I think phones have come to be like that. We just assume that when we pick up the handset, it will work, whether it is the wired house phone or the wireless cell phone. But there have always been outages of various sorts.

In the old days, the phone battery might be dead; and in our new days today, we still must keep an eye on the phone battery and keep it charged. Cell phones used to encounter many dead spots where there was no "signal," or a very weak signal. That has improved over the past several years, with more phone service towers being placed over the countryside, but even today, I have places where my cell phone won't connect. For example, at the farm, north of Pea Ridge, if I am at the barn, no signal. I have to go up to the road, or to the top of the hill, to take a call or to make a call. At the lower level, the phone rings, but it won't talk. It is a very inconvenient thing to be "almost" able to talk to someone, but not!

I'm becoming accustomed to cars which just almost always start when you turn the ignition to START. You don't have to pull the choker, you don't have to set the throttle in any certain way, you don't have to keep the car warm, you don't need starter fluid, the cars won't flood out from being choked too much, they just turn a few rounds and start. But, when they for some reason DON'T start (and there are still several reasons), it is such an inconvenience!

The things we learned about the old cars often don't apply now. We can't set the choke, there is none. We can't check the points and condenser, there are none. There are still spark plugs and wires and coils, but they seldom go bad. The non-start problem may mean the electronic ignition has gone bad. How do you diagnose an electronic ignition out under a shade tree? In the old days, many motor vehicle ailments could be repaired under a shade tree. Not so with today's cars. You need electronic test equipment, to run the codes, and you may need some book learnin' to figure out why the car won't go.

Back in 1945, as World War II was winding down, we got electricity on the farm. One of the first priorities was to put an electric water pump in the well. Our farm well was a "dug" well, about 40 feet deep, with a shallow basin at the bottom. The well supplied good water, but we were soon to find that there wasn't that much of it. In the early 1940s, we drew water with a bucket, letting the bucket down into the well until we could see it fill with water at the bottom, and then we pulled it up using a rope and pulley. We would come to the well with the house water bucket in hand, pour the water drawn by the well bucket into the house bucket, and carry our water supply to its place on the kitchen counter. At first we had a big dishpan, and a washpan for washing our faces. Sometime about 1944 we had installed a kitchen sink which drained into the garden behind the house. We had glasses of water at meals, but if we wanted a drink between meals we used the metal dipper to get a drink from the water bucket.

Once we had an electric jet pump in the well, we could run pipes to the house and barn and garden. What convenience! We soon had running water, hot and cold running water, and before long we had a bathroom in the house, with a gleaming white bathtub replacing the old No. 3 galvanized washtub, a white lavatory replacing the old wash pan, and a white commode replacing the old outhouse. We even used white rolls of toilet paper rather than crumpling up pages of the Montgomery Ward catalog. But we soon found that if we used too much water too quickly, our new jet pump would pump the well dry, and we had to wait for the well basin to fill again from the little underground stream. Besides that, when the pump ran dry, it would lose its prime, and even when water returned to the well, the pump couldn't start again on its own. That meant we had to climb down into the new well house, carrying our bucket of water "TO" the well, and pour it into the pump to "prime it." What an inconvenience! We learned to fill the bathtub with only three or four inches of water. We got a perfectly good bath that way, and we didn't run the well dry.

Today, we have a deep drilled well, and an almost trouble-free submersible water pump. Almost trouble-free!! I spent a couple of days this week wrestling with the pump after its trouble-free period ran out. We had these two nice guys with a truck-mounted derrick hoisting the old locked-up pump out of the well, and sending down a new one. It was quite a pain in the pocketbook, but the guys got us going again, and we have gone from major inconvenience to convenience again!

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Editorial on 02/05/2014