The Windmill Mom Was Told to Scrap

A new 702 head for an eight foot wheel, shipped to the co-op yard, came to just under two thousand four hundred dollars with freight.

That was money we did not have lying around. I put it on the card and did not tell my wife the full number until the head came, which I am not proud of. She forgave me faster than I deserved.

I also ordered new leathers for the pump cylinder, a new sucker rod coupling, and a gallon of the oil Aermotor tells you to use. The leathers were cheap. It was the head that cost.

The first Saturday, Kade and I drove out to Mom’s at daybreak. The grass in the Sandhills was still winter gold, dry and pale, with the first green only a promise down at the roots.

Mom was already up. She had coffee on and a plate of cinnamon rolls on the counter, and she had her blue jacket on over her housedress because the mornings were still cool.

“I’m coming out,” she said.

“You’re going to sit,” I said.

“I’m going to sit out there,” she said, and she did. She carried a lawn chair out to the tank and set it where she could see the whole tower, and she sat in it with her coffee like it was the county fair.

Before anybody climbed anything, I walked the tower. It was a four post steel tower, about thirty feet to the platform.

The legs were set in concrete her daddy poured by hand. Every bolt I put a wrench to was tight.

Rust on the braces, yes. Some surface rust on the ladder rungs. But that tower was sound. They built them to last, and that one had lasted eighty years of Sandhills wind.

The ladder on the tower did not start at the ground. It started about eight feet up.

Dad had cut the bottom rungs off when Glen and I were little, after he caught Glen halfway up it at age six.

So we leaned Mom’s old aluminum extension ladder against the leg to reach the first rung. Kade held the bottom of it for me the first time. I remember thinking how much he looked like my dad from above.

I put my harness on at the base, the same full body harness I wear at work, with a lanyard and a rope grab. Kade wore the spare one from the co-op. I checked every buckle on him twice.

“Three points of contact,” I told him. “All the time. You clip before you unclip. If you get scared, you stop and hug the tower. Nobody’s in a hurry.”

“Dad,” he said. “I know.”

“Tell me anyway,” I said, and he did, word for word, and that is how I knew he was listening.

The first job was the pump. You do not touch the head until you have the pump rod disconnected, or the wheel can turn on you and run that rod up and down while you’re standing next to it.

The wheel was already furled and chained. I climbed up and checked the furl chain and the brake anyway. Then I came down and we disconnected the pump rod at the swivel above the well.