Windmills

Yesterday the wind blew hard enough most of the day to blow a small dog away which got me to thinking more about it. To be honest, I spend a good share of my time cussing the wind. Either we have too much or not enough. I don't like being horseback when the wind is blowing very hard. For one thing, if you are riding a horse that tends to be on the spooky side (which most of mine are) the wind makes everything look much scarier. That makes whatever I am doing horseback just a little less enjoyable. For another thing, the wind just wears a person out. It doesn't seem to matter what job you're doing, working in a strong wind seems to make it more work. But whether or not I like it, we need the wind. See, those things you see when you are driving down the road out in the middle of nowhere, those big pinwheel looking things turning around up in the air with 20 to 30 foot towers under them? Those are windmills. They water our cows. And boy, do we need them. As my dad often says, "a cow can live without fences, but she can't live without water."

Nebraska is blessed with one of the largest and best sources of underground water in the world. The Ogallala Aquifer. I used to know how many ca-jillion gallons of water the experts estimated were under our precious sandhills, but I don't remember any more. Suffice to say, it's a heck of a lot of water. There are some who will tell you at the rate we are using our water, it will be dried up in my lifetime. I hope not, but we'll have to see.....At any rate, that's where we get our water to water our cows, and us for that matter. And we are blessed to have the best tasting water of anywhere in the world. It's a wonderful elixir our Sandhill water.

Unfortunately, windmills break down and stuff on them wears out. I am not a lover of windmill work, however, it is a necessary evil. Without getting too technical (not my strong suit anyway) with the workings of the windmill, allow me to say, the thing at the top has a fan, a motor and a wheel. The fan turns the wheel into the wind. The wheel turns around(here's where we need the wind) and moves gears that are in the motor. Attached to the motor is a pump rod and lots of rods that go down into the well. Those rods go up and down and bring up the water. Depending upon where you are in the sandhills, even where you are in the county I live in, there is quite a difference as to how many of those rods there will be to get to the water. On our end of the county, a normal well is about seven or eight rods and they are about 20 feet long. On the west end of the county, you might have one or two rods the same length. At the bottom of all of the rods there will be a plunger and on that plunger there will be leathers. Those leathers wear out on occasion (some a lot more often than others) and we have to "pull" the well (pull all the rods up to get to the leathers) to change them. I guess it isn't that bad of a job, except for the fact that most of the time, we do it with a block and tackle or a come-along. Some people have "well rigs" that have a big boom truck and can raise and lower the rods with the truck. We have one, but it is seldom running right so we do it by hand. There are lots of other things that break or wear out, but that is the most common well work we have to do.

Another great thing about windmills is maintenance. In that motor I talked about, there is oil for the gears. Dirty, vile, oil.....I think you are supposed to drain the oil annually and refill. WE usually end up just making sure there is oil in there and refilling. But someone (and that someone isn't me, by the way) has to climb up the tower and stand on a tiny platform (if they are lucky enough to HAVE a platform), open the bonnet and check and refill the oil. This is where the fact that I am short in stature comes in handy. I am too short to do anything up there on that tower. I can't reach the top of the motor....and I hate it too. Not.

In the summer time, we check water in our pastures several times a week. I have heard of people that didn't do this and had cattle die because they didn't have a drink. One time, years ago, Dad and I were in a neighbor's pasture looking for a stray bull and saw that their cows were almost out of water. Dad called the neighbor and told him. The neighbor said there was a puddle the cows could drink out of. They didn't look to us like they were getting a drink....and we heard that he lost several because he didn't do anything. I have thought about what a terrible death that must have been for those poor cows. They didn't understand why they felt so bad and why they were so thirsty. How much they must have suffered.....I have a hard time with animals suffering. They die, that happens, but I just hate the thought of suffering....

I didn't mention that the water pumps into big bottomless tanks. Made of metal and of differing sizes, they hold a lot of water when they are in good condition. We put very heavy plastic on the ground where the tank will go and up the sides of the tank. Then sand is put around the edges to make a seal. Sometimes we use bentonite to make it seal better and to stop any leaks that might occur.

Our water is one of those things that truly makes this God's cattle country. We are blessed with good, clean water underground........ and the wind, no matter how much I cuss it.