Four Hundred Feet of Line to Grandma’s Barn

I walked back down the slope. I did not slam anything. Grandma was still on the bench. She watched me come, and I could see she was braced for whatever I was going to say.

“Well?” she said.

“Grandma, how far is it from your gate to my line?”

She blinked. “What?”

My place sits right across the east fence from hers. I bought twelve acres there eight years ago because I wanted my kids to grow up next to their great-grandmother. I have my own well, a good one, drilled to a hundred and sixty feet, with a pressure tank in my shop and a frost-free hydrant out by my garden.

I walked it off that afternoon, out in the September heat, with Grandma’s old measuring wheel that had been Grandpa’s. From the tee off my pressure line, out the shop wall, across my yard, through the fence, and across the corner of her pasture to her pole gate by the barn.

Four hundred and six feet. I wrote it on the back of my hand with a carpenter’s pencil.

I have been a plumber for nineteen years. I have run water lines for half the farms and new houses between Manhattan and Bozeman. Four hundred feet of buried line is not a hard job. It is just a long one.

I called my wife from the pasture. “I’m going to need you to take the kids to your mother’s tomorrow,” I said.

“What happened?”

I told her. She was quiet a second. “What do you need?”

“A trencher. Pipe. A tank. And a day of good weather.”

“Weather says sunny and seventy-five,” she said. “Go get your trencher.”

That evening, while it was still light, I drove into town to the rental yard and reserved their walk-behind trencher for Saturday. It is a hydrostatic orange machine on rubber wheels with a four-foot boom, which matters here. In our valley you want a water line at least four feet down, or you will be digging it up in January.

The trencher was two hundred and eighty-five dollars for the day. The man behind the counter asked what I was digging. I told him four hundred feet of water line. He looked at me and said, “In one day?”

“In one day.”

“Start early,” he said. “And grease the chain at lunch.”

I bought four hundred and fifty feet of one-inch blue poly water pipe, the pressure-rated kind, in three coils. A frost-free hydrant with a five-foot bury. Brass fittings, insert couplings, stainless clamps. And a three-hundred-gallon galvanized stock tank, oval, the kind with the drain plug on the side.

All told it came to a little over eleven hundred dollars with the trencher. I put it on my business card and did not think about it again.

Saturday morning I was at Grandma’s gate by seven, with the sun just over the Bridgers and frost still on the low spots. I have to say this part plain: I did not sneak. I wanted Corbin to see it. Not to rub his nose in it. I wanted him to see that he did not have the only water in the valley.

Grandma was already up. She had coffee on and she had made a plate of biscuits and sausage gravy, which is what she makes when she is worried and wants her hands busy.