Story #2 .. different vain.

[DemoTex]

The well house at Moccasin Swamp farm has been a pavilion of summer delight for over a century now. The structure and its surrounds are fenced off from the farm’s livestock, but are close enough to several stock watering ponds to enjoy an abundant supply of fresh catfish for a summer evening’s fish fry. Located adjacent to a rectangular half-acre swimming pond, the pavilion serves as a unique gathering place for extended family, friends, and the occasional wedding, wake, or political rally. The building is an open air rectangle of simple post-and-beam design, with thick cypress timbers from the nearby swamp spreading loads and sharing tension through intricate mortice-and-tenon joinery. A system of king-post braces supports the roof structure with an architectural geometry that is more old-Europe than south Alabama. The roof itself is the original hand hewn cypress shingles, probably good for another hundred years or so. The primitive brick floor is rough underfoot, laid with mortarless joints in a herringbone pattern. A massive stone-and-brick cooking pit, large enough to roast a shoat, dominates the east end of the well house. Ancient heart-pine and hardwood benches, like well worn pews in a country church, line the inside perimeter of the pavilion.

The main attraction, indeed the raison d’etre, of this structure is the artesian well. Deep-drilled into the underlying aquifer, natural pressure forces water up at a constant flow rate without need for pumps. The cold, delicious water is discharged through a 2-inch iron pipe into a chest-high, moss-lined, stone holding tank; six feet square and open at the top. The constant sibilant gushing of water from the pipe into the tank is the background music of the well house. Another iron pipe, located about two feet from the stone tank’s bottom, allows water to flow by gravity from the well house into the swimming pond. The swimming pond, as you might imagine, is kept full of clear, cold, aerated artesian well-water. A third iron pipe - a vertical standpipe - connects at the wellhead manifold and passes through the roof of the structure. The purpose of the standpipe is to protect the plumbing system from over-pressurization. This rheological concept is well understood by children, who delight in capping off the discharge pipe with their hands and listening as the water, taking the path of least resistance up the standpipe, spills out onto the roof of the pavilion.

On the benches, women visit quietly while children swim and play. Later - much later - the children and some of the adults will lie on blankets outside the well house and watch for shooting stars. The men-folk sip sweet, minty iced tea (or, in a couple of cases, bourbon) and watch as the older boys fry catfish in a dull, cast iron cauldron over a propane flame in the cooking pit. Twitchy horses watch too, from over the split-rail fence. Subtle scents of freshly mown hay mingle with frangipani, rosemary, and the cooking smells of the frying fish. Kerosene lanterns hang from the cypress summer-beam and add a flickering, magical quality to the well house after dark. As the moonless night becomes a black Rothko canvas, chimeric shadows dance from the sulfur-yellow light of the lanterns, and the friction of time is as palpable as the wheeling of the constellations overhead. To any late comers, approaching from the main road, over the cattle guard and up the open driveway through the lower pasture, the apparition of the well house is as enticing and ineluctable as a gauzy, balsamic summer night’s dream.

[DemoTex]

1. Story #2 Illustration

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My mother with her sisters. All are dead now except mom (front lower center) and her youngest sister (upper right). The youngest sisters's husband and I flew missions against the same targets at the same time in Laos. He got a DFC for NVA tank kills in the A Shau Valley. He was driving an F-4C Phantom.

THIS PICTURE WAS TAKEN AT THE WELLHOUSE I DESCRIBED

[burrowowl]

2. K&R