Back To The Land

Life used to be really simple living in a small cabin in the hills, another middle class white kid who moved to the country and didn't really know what he was doing. I never went to the dump, didn't have any garbage! Yeah, the original ecologists: if you don't have money you don't make trash. That still blows my mind: I didn't have garbage! And no running water either so I decided to do something about that and it brings to mind this episode.
The first year on the mountain I hauled gallon glass jugs up the hill, maybe five gallons twice a week up from the county road. I didn't pay rent and had never met the owner of the land. I had helped a friend move out because this other guy had promised the owner some improvements if he'd let him move in. Then the new guy changed his mind so I wrote the owner a one sentence letter telling him that I had moved in. I never saw him in the three years I lived up there doing whatever I wanted on his land--that's just how things were back then.
I went back home during the winter and came back the next Spring with a $300 Dodge Dart stationwagon. The first time I drove up that steep dirt road with a 55gallon barrel of water in the back there were lots of other things in the car wedging in the barrel. At the top of the road I ran the water into another barrel above the cabin. A black plastic line snaked to a faucet over the little sink.
The next time I hauled a barrel up the hill I thought gee I don't remember doing anything special to secure the barrel; I filled that sucker up at a nearby spring and headed up the mountain. When I got to the top the barrel burst out of the back of the car smashing the window and hurtled down the hill--440 pounds of out of control water! If it had hit the cabin there would have been two holes in it.
Live and learn/ What a hill muffin.
(After that misadventure I started securing the barrel with an old tire; the next year I got a truck and could haul two barrels--I was on my way!)