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HOMEFRONT: Windmill well is a guide for living

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By Alma Gaul | Wednesday, February 06, 2008 | No comments posted

When I was growing up, a “windmill” meant only one thing — a tower with blades that supplied water. It wasn’t about generating electricity, as in our story last week about a Coal Valley, Ill., man and his newly installed turbine.

Following my dad to the windmill to put it in and out of gear was an adventure because it was some distance from the house in an open pasture. Sometimes there were cattle in the pasture, so I’d stick close to Dad so they wouldn’t hurt me. That was probably an unfounded fear, but when they came running up to us, how did I know if they would stop?

As we got close to the windmill, we could hear a sort of other-worldly sound that was a combination of the wheel creaking in the wind, the shaft clanging up and down in the well below and sometimes the rush of water in the well itself.

It was a one-of-a-kind combination of sounds, like the trill of a chickadee is one-of-a-kind.

Sometimes Dad would push off the concrete well cover so we could look down in the hole, but he always held onto me, lest I fall forward into that scary, telescoping abyss.

While this was an adventure to me, it was one more chore for my dad. There was no “remote start;” there was a walk.

As I think about the windmill now, it occurs to me that it was an elegant thing in several ways. First, it was a clean, understandable, mechanical machine, no digital mumbo-jumbo magic that few people really understood.

The wind turned the blades that rotated the gears of a wheel connected to a shaft. As the shaft moved up and down, it pumped water from the well to a holding tank, and the tank supplied water to our place. If something went wrong, it could be fixed with hand-held tools.

Second, it was a metaphor for conservation. One could not pump out more water than went in. If you pumped until the well was nearly dry, you had to wait until it was replenished before you pumped more.

How much better off we would be if we applied this frugal principle more universally.

Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.