Part Two of "the Easy Life", in which Dorris gets her oats....

First, a big “tank you” to everyone who commented on the story so far. I know the writing isn’t that great, but the story itself is just too good not to tell. If only it were too good to be true.

OK, part two of The Easy Life…

At the end of part one, having lived through a miniature first-person screening of the closing scene from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, I decide to work from the outside of the tank to get it to pop back into shape. First, I carefully build a very large and heavy beam across the top of the hole in which the tank sits. The new idea is to somehow attach a tow chain or big cable to the top of the tank, and use a several-ton hand-winch to pull the top of the tank up to the big beam I just built. To make sure I don’t just yank a hole in the top of the tank, I cut several two-foot diameter discs of heavy plywood, bolt them together, and use them as a backing inside the top of the tank. Then I borrow a large shackle from the axle of my truck, and bolt the shackle through the top of the tank and the plywood backing. I carefully crawl out to the center of the beam, and precariously balanced, begin to crank the winch handle and draw the tank back into shape. At first it pulls easily, and the tank begins to regain some of its original volume. Eventually, though, it stops cooperating. I have about four tons of pressure applied to the top of the tank, but instead of continuing to pop open, the entire tank begins to lift out of the hole. I let just enough pressure off the tank so it settles back to the bottom of the hole, then cautiously tap at the top of the tank with my foot while hanging off the beam. I would say that a sane person would venture no further, but actually, a sane person would never find themselves in this position in the first place. Of course, the cautious toe tapping doesn't yield results, eventually leading to a wholesale jump from the beam onto the top of the tank… and it works!! The tank actually pops back from a half-crushed five or six hundred gallon volume to its original thousand-gallon volume in just a split second. “I’m a $#&*@@$ genius”, I think to myself as I rise into the air along with the thousand pounds of rocks and dirt that was also occupying the particular five hundred gallons of the universe that the tank had no use for just a moment before.

I have developed a sort of standard response to situations where I find myself lying on the ground some distance from the place I last remember being…, and that is… I spit in my hand. Often, I’m still not sure if I’ve broken anything, or if I can even get up, but what I want to know right off the bat is… did I bust any teeth? I hate having teeth knocked out. One, its, ridiculously painful given the actual severity of the injury, and two, its’ gonna cost a lot of money. So before I even start to work up the nerve to move various body parts around, I wanna know if any teeth were involved. And whaddayaknow? No blood in my hand. No teeth. Its’ still a good day.

The next part of the job is to set a pump inside the tank. Prior to this, I had set up several various types of systems where the pumps were inside the cabin, and they must draw water from the tank, and push it through the pipes to the sink. That last sentence sounds a little didactic at the end, because this is devolving into a brief but boring lesson on pumps. Pumps like to push. Pumps hate to suck. If the pump is located above the water source, it must first suck that water up. It is orders of magnitude more efficient for a pump to reside below the level of the water it is pumping from. So, I decided to use a small pump that you would normally find in someone’s well, but instead, set it inside our water tank. This will give us much better pressure, and use less much less electricity. Yay. What this also means was that it will require a sizeable 120 volt AC inverter to convert our DC battery power to AC current for this type of pump. But not to worry, because I have done my homework, and have purchased a large inverter that is actually sized for the new pump. Sometimes, I’m amazing like that.

After setting the pump in the tank, and running the outlet pipe through the bottom of the tank, I hooked up the underwater electric lines to the pump. The wiring has its’ own set of openings, and everything comes up out of the ground and is hooked into the cabin’s massive plumbing and electric system (one sink, two lights, and two power outlets). I trot down to the lake, fire up the gasoline-powered firefighter’s water pump, and fill the new tank with a sense of pride, and anticipation of a long-overdue bath beckoning. I hoof it back up the hill and everything seems a “go”. After a couple of double checks of my wiring settings, set the shut-off triggers on the pressure switches, I make the inaugural throw of the switch. And… nothing happens. At all. Turn off the switch. Re-check all electric lines. Throw switch again. Start to get annoyed.

I make a list of possible problems in my mind. Number one keeps surfacing as; the inverter is not providing enough start-up juice. With most electric motors, there is a significant initial draw of electricity that can be ten times the actual rated amperage of the motor. And they never provide that info in advance. Solution: hook up two inverters! In a brilliant act of foresight, I have a spare identical inverter on hand, as out here I always try to have a back-up for the most critical components of daily life. I wire together the output so I have double the capacity to start the pump. Throw the switch again… and right there, in my kitchen, appear the Northern Lights, the Southern Lights, the Fourth of July, and New Year’s Eve firework displays, all at the same time. I could have sold tickets to the light show. Very pretty. And stinky. And a tad spendy.

Turns out, you don’t need to synchronize DC power inputs, but you must synchronize the AC outputs from the inverters if they are powering the same device. Sock that bit of advice away, along with “pumps like to push, not suck”, in case you are a post-apocalyptic survivor. Your new neighbors might decide to keep you around instead of having you for dinner. (OK, that’s a stretch, but I’m pretending like this is practical advice I’m disseminating in story guise). (And I can’t think of another feasible scenario in which said advice might serve as practical).

So, how now to test the pump for damage? Well, the lightest gauge wiring is to be found in, of course, the underwater connections. And where is the pump right now? Underwater. Perfect. Next step… rummage around till I find one of my wetsuits, booties, dive mask, and enough PVC to devise a make-shift five-foot long snorkel. I have an underwater headlamp (where the hell did I get that?), and a pair of wire cutters when I descend through the irritatingly-tight manhole into the full water tank. Kinda spooky, I have to confess. I have to fool around for a little while to tie myself to the bottom of the tank to resist the buoyancy of the wetsuit and my inhalations. Finally, I get situated and stay still long enough for the murky water to clear off so I can inspect the wiring. Sure enough, the shrouding over the underwater connections looks burned pretty good. I realize I will have to cut sections out of the wiring, and bring down the underwater soldering set-up (and where the hell did I get that?) to fix the connections. But first, I need to cut the wiring to see how much of it got fried. And that’s when things got strange….

A very, very unusual feeling swept over me, and the tank seemed to have a strange green glow, like those luminescent sticks you break open and play with on dark nights. The strange feeling intensified, "but that’s OK", I think, " a floating feeling is natural for someone floating in a water tank…", duh… but nonetheless, I start to get a little concerned, because I begin to think I’m not in the tank any longer, even though I can see my hands holding the wire cutters against the pump feed… ...and then I notice someone off to my right, in my peripheral vision… ...I turn to him, thinking maybe to ask for help, or at least an explanation of the current situation… …but he is bent over, in pain, laughing uncontrollably, sobbing the helpless tears of an adolescent male watching reruns of the Three Stooges… … and as I realize he is going to be of no help at all, the green light in the tank goes out, the wire cutters drop from my hand to the bottom of the tank, and I cut the anchor line from my waist and shoot to the surface of the water and out onto the frozen ground.

I normally resist the urge to imbibe when working with power equipment or electricity, but I decide that now would be a good time for a glass of single malt. As in “Very Fine Scotch Whiskey”. No ice, please. I peel off my very wet wetsuit, and slip into a glass of Lagavulan in front of the wood stove. As I am drying off and warming up, I think of the fellow off to my right in the tank. I start laughing too, thinking what a sight that would have been, and gleefully imagining who the hell my imaginary friend might have been.

But back to work, Lad. Now that I have successfully discharged the capacitors built into the pump... (!!!!! so that’s what happened... (note of interest; total capacitance for this pump; @~24,000 volts) !!!), ... at least it should be safe to re-enter the tank and solder new connections in place. This time, I wear a drysuit. It is warmer. It also turns out to be even harder to keep submerged than a wetsuit. But, “Bricks-in-His-Drawers” and/or “Perseverance” is my middle name, boys, and I solder the lines underwater without burning a hole in the most expensive suit I own. (I’m detailing all the little successes like that, so you don’t think I’m completely incompetent). (The success tally is now at... uh, "1"). And now for the bummer. That is the anti-climatic ending to this part of the story. Afterward, I hooked up the generator directly to the pump, and it *actually* worked. I pumped thirty gallons of water inside, heated it on the wood stove, and took a loooooooong hot bath. And put a serious dent in that bottle of Lagavulin. Just another week in paradise under my belt.

Post Script… the following year, I was assisting at a Blackfoot sundance in Heart Butte. One evening, midweek, I was telling this same story to some Blood friends, one of whom was the elder holy man for the Sundance ceremony. We were all laughing very hard at my follies, and after wiping away some tears, the elder, George Goodstriker, looked at me with an earnest but troubled grin, and said, ”That was Napi. Who you saw in the tank with you, that was the Creator. And I’m afraid you are going to live a very long life, because the creator loves to laugh, more than anything in the universe.”