There are two rules that should never be broken on a ranch. Never let a kid do a job his own way, and don’t let him leave town with matches. The combination of the two can turn deadly serious in mere seconds. To add to this possible event, the kid actually enjoys his job. Enjoyment and ranching should never occupy the same sentence.
My job was cut out for me. For several weeks we had been moving cattle all over the ranch and selling a lot of cattle. We were caught in a severe drought and most of the grass was gone. Cattle were dying all over the area, and we were selling at extremely low prices. Often, we would just barely pay for the truck and drivers expense to get the cattle to the market. It always amazed me that cattle prices could be a quarter a pound at the stockyard and still be $3.00 or more for a steak at the butcher counter. Someone was making a hell of a profit, but it wasn’t us!
While the cowboys did the work with the animals, I worked on the wells, maintaining equipment and pumping water. This was mainly due to my difficulty remaining in the saddle for any stretch of time. Since many of the pastures were now empty, I could patch holes in the drinkers and clean the mud and plants out of them as well.
I always started this job by siphoning the water out of the drinker, leaving only thick, black mud and slimy plants. Some of the drinkers or tanks woud include the job of catching the many goldfish that had been planted in them years before. They worked wonders at keeping the plant growth at bay and were always a beautiful sight when out pumpening wells all day. Siphoning the water out of the drinkers could take all day, and the storage tanks would take several days. It would have been much faster if the previous well man had maintained the equipment, particularly the gas-powered trash pump. Instead, I was forced to use several old garden hoses. Besides being extremely slow, due to the minimal amount of water that could flow through them, I was also forced to use the "suck and spit" method to get the siphon flowing initially. Not only did the water have all sorts of creatures living in it, they evidently did not taste the flavor of the liquid or the muck at the bottom that seemed to always get sucked up the hose and into my mouth. After the container was drained of water, I would leave it for a week or two to dry out some.
On the dreaded day, I would pull on my irrigation boots (two sizes too small since they didn’t come in size 16) and climb into the bog—the pit of eternal stench. Using my flat shovel, I would scrape a load of mud off the bottom of the drinker, carry it to the edge, and toss it as far as possible, often 6 to 10 inches, outside the drinker. A yellow biohazard space suit would have been nice, but not allowed here. We did everything the old fashioned way; we broke our backs and got really dirty.
When the mud slapped to the ground, it would splash right back at the shoveler into waiting arms, body, and face. One did not open his mouth at this time. Unfortunately, I had tasted this goop several times before, and I would much rather have been served a bowl of soup from the septic tank any day! The black mud was the consistency of shampoo, had a gritty, oily feel to it and smelled like rotten cabbage and decaying meat at the same time. I never ate lunch during one of these jobs for fear of losing breakfast, lunch, and my future dinner, all at once.
The shoveling would continue until the drinker was completely cleaned. This often took several days with rest periods in between and many showers using an SOS Brillo pad to try, unsuccessfully, to remove the gray-dyed skin and putrid smell. A word of advice: Never plan a date for the evening after mucking out a drinker!
Storage tanks were worse for several reasons. They were bigger so they often weren’t cleaned for decades at a time. They were also much taller, some were eight feet tall. Throwing the mud over the wall was more exhausting, but it made the job slightly more pleasant. You see, when the mud landed on the outside of the tank, approximately one out of every three or four times, the mud would splash against the side of the tank. Tanks held more strange creatures to observe and the ever present fear that there lived some rogue eight foot salamander with a taste for fresh human meat, lurking in the mud, ready to strike at any moment.
I had spent several weeks working on this task when a good friend decided to show me a neat experiment. He worked at the nearby power plant, so I figured he knew what he was doing. He demonstrated a BLEVE to me. BLEVE is an acronym for Boiling Liquid, Expanding Vapor Explosion. Cut back to the two most important rules of letting your kids, especially boys, work on a ranch!
We found an old, unused, empty drinker for the demonstration. My friend placed a steel hubcap in the center of the drinker and positioned a steel pipe as a filler tube. He then filled the hubcap with gasoline and lit it. The gas burned for quite a while turning the hubcap pink and deforming it slightly. When the flame was out, this idiot, who I had thought was rather intelligent, replaced the filler pipe on the hubcap and poured gasoline into the pink dish. The gasoline boiled furiously as my friend, the idiot, hustled away from the drinker to me.
The grand finale was upon us. From a distance of 50 or so feet, my friend soaked the toe of a sock filled with rocks in some gas, lit it, and threw it toward the drinker. The flames erupted in a vertical blast that shot at least 50 feet into the air. All the oxygen in the surrounding area seemed to disappear momentarily and the flash of heat was tremendous. After recovering from shock and awe, an idea began forming in my head. Cleaning tanks would be much easier from now on.
I drove to that next tank with a sense of purpose. It had been drying for a week now and it was time to clean it and remove all the cattails and reeds that had been growing in it for the past 20 years.
I arrived at the tank and got my four tools out of the truck: a five gallon can of gasoline, a sock, a lighter, and a long steel pipe. I poured the gas into the hubcap, using the same method that my buddy did. After the fire went out, I dribbled some gas down the pipe and into the hubcap. I then filled the sock with rocks, moistened the tip in gasoline, and lit it up. Swinging the sock around, I felt like a Tongan fire dancer. I launched my fiery stones into the Goliath water tank and felt the concussion and the air rushing past me while the intense flames hungrily ate any oxygen within a hundred feet or more. The flash of light blinded me temporarily, and for a brief moment I was sure I had somehow created fusion and a small atomic blast. Black smoke and flames shot into the air and formed a picture-perfect mushroom-shaped cloud. I felt like an observer at the first tests at White Sands, New Mexico.
The heat was tremendous, the black column of smoke enormous, and my fear of being discovered trying to light the world on fire put the first two fears to shame!
The explosion only lasted a few seconds, but it took nearly two days for the fire to burn out. The mud must have turned into a form of oil to keep the low flames going. When I climbed in a week later, I was able to scoop out dried mud and charred creatures. There was no plant life to be seen, nor did I find the monster salamander during my shoveling.
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