Sweetwater Days 09

Water you sayin’? Part 1

I love Sweetwater.  Our property in the Ozark Mountains is a place where Annie and I can relax and entertain our grandkids.  I can hunt and we can walk in the woods.

Or we can work.  Boy, can we work.

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When we were shopping for land where we could have a cabin in the woods, Annie and I both, independently, found a property that sounded about as perfect as it could be, within our budget anyway.  I’ve told the story before so I won’t tell it again this time, but we were taken to see the property by real estate agent Zeke Barrett. 

Among our preferences for a property was that we would love to have a live spring.  A live spring is one that flows all year ‘round so it can be depended on for drinking water.  A couple places we looked at had springs, but they didn’t flow year ‘round.

One of the first things we did when Zeke was showing us the place was walk down to the creek.  The flowing water was very low due to one of the worst droughts Zeke had seen in that area…but it was flowing.  There was no water visible in the creek bed above the spring, so all the water was clearly coming from the spring itself. 

I squeezed through a tangled mass of fallen trees that had jammed up in the stream and bent over a spot where water was trickling out from under a layer of bedrock.  I scooped up a handful of water and drank it down, then exclaimed, “Wow, this water is sweet!”

To those who aren’t familiar with the expression, calling water sweet doesn’t mean it has a leaking bee hive dripping into it.  It means the water has no bad taste, muddy, bitter, or otherwise.

The first place my mom and dad lived after they got married was a farm south of Malden, Missouri which bore the name Sweetwater.

It hit me that we could name our new place and honor my parents at the same time.

That’s why we call it Sweetwater.

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We bought Sweetwater in August of 2020 and immediately started working on fixing what needed fixing, adding what we wanted to add, and modifying what we thought we could improve. 

As for the spring, a previous owner (If I had to guess, I’d say around 100 years ago.) had built a stone and concrete wall to route creek water around the place where the spring ran out from under the stone shelf.  Thus I knew they intended to use that delicious water for drinking and other things but the water was so shallow, maybe an inch deep, that it would have been difficult to scoop up even a cup full of it.  I’m sure they probably had some method to make getting it easier, but, other than the wall, I could find no traces of modifications except for a little concrete on the bed of the creek opposite the spring.

While Zeke was showing us around the property, I asked him if the spring flowed year-round.  He told me honestly that most of the springs on properties he has sold flowed year ‘round, according to the sellers.  However, his experience was that most of those actually dry up for some period each year.  Then he pointed to some small pools that could not have contained more than a few hundred gallons of water in them at the time.  “See those little fish?” 

I don’t remember if he said what species they were, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I just call them minnows.

Zeke went on to explain, “Those bigger ones (about three inches long) are mature and that indicates that they’ve been there at least a year.”  In other words, the spring flows year ‘round.

The little spring was a live one!  It had the potential to supply water for our wants and needs!

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Annie and I have so many things we want to do at the camp that we have formulated an unofficial priority list.  Obviously, the safety of our grandkids puts some things at the very top of the list.  Things that will make our time there more enjoyable are pretty high too.  Since enjoying the outdoors is one of the reasons I wanted a cabin in the first place, that has a priority that increases as hunting season approaches. Weather can move things that are normally pretty low on the list to a higher place.  When it’s raining, too cold, too wet, etc. we can stay in the cabin and do things that would otherwise be lower on the list.

Thus it was that coming up with a method of getting drinking and cooking water from the spring was important, but getting it run to the cabin could wait while we replaced the dangerous steps up to the porch so the grands could get up and down without falling through…or off, for that matter.  It had no rails.

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As I said, the spring was flowing.  However, it flowed from under the layer of rock in a sheet about four feet wide, and no more than an inch deep at its deepest.  So the water could be scooped out, but the user could only dip out about a gulp of it at a time, and took a chance of including sand and tiny gravel in that container.

To make procuring water easier, I’d need to dam the spring and allow the water level to rise or, better yet, capture it so it could be run through a pipe to a point where it could be used more efficiently.

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So, while our son, Bobby, was visiting, he and I worked on building a low dam to raise the level of the water after it flowed out from under the stone shelf. On the surface, if you’ll forgive the pun, that sounds pretty simple; just build something impermeable to water and as tall as you want it. 

Oh, that it were that easy.

You see, water, being the thin liquid that it is, can flow through cracks so tiny that you can barely see them.  Also, it will fill an impoundment until it reaches the height of another, perhaps unseen, outlet, then flow out there rather than continuing to fill our preferred reservoir.  Also, if you build that dam high enough and watertight enough that it causes water to back up for long periods, you stand the risk that the spring will silt-in, or fill the original outlet, and reroute permanently to the new crack in the rock, which could be nearby, or far, far away.  The original spring can then dry up completely.

This is called “killing” the spring.   

By experimentation, I came to the conclusion that I would only be able to back the water up behind my dam to a depth of about four or five inches.  That’s not a lot, but it is a lot better than the one-inch depth I had seen when I first saw the spring.

I had bought a roll of 1 ½” diameter black plastic pipe and ordered a couple stone mason’s chisels and a three-pound sledge hammer.  I used the hammer and one of the chisels to carve out a channel in the bedrock, into which I could lay the pipe.  Then Bobby and I built the bottom tiers of a stone dam while running the pipe through the lowest part of it.  We ran the pipe downstream to the nearest pool that gave us enough height so Annie and I could hold a bucket or jug under the open end and fill it.

Obviously, while that progress was immeasurably better than before, it only brought us a little closer to our eventual goal.  After all, when we had guests who wanted to use the “indoor facilities” someone still had to carry water uphill and into the cabin to fill and refill the toilet tank.  We have two six-gallon jugs that I would fill at the pipe, then carry uphill, then up the stairs (a total of at least 30-feet), through the cabin, and then lift each jug with one hand so that I could tip it with the other and pour it into the tank.

Six gallons of water weighs 48 pounds…plus the weight of the container.  The imbalance of carrying one jug puts a kink in my aging back, so, believe it or not, I found it preferable to carry both jugs, weighing a total of about 100 pounds, and turning sideways so that they and I could fit between the stair railings, while climbing up the steps sideways.  Yes, I certainly could have only partially filled the jugs, but that would have meant more trips climbing up and down that hill and through the cabin, potentially while some poor unfortunate was waiting to finish their after-toilet cleanup until more flushing-water had arrived.

We actually tried that one time when Annie asked me to pour more water in the porcelain throne while she, of necessity, stood there waiting.  As I emptied the jug, I looked at my bride and observed, “And they said after we’d been married this long all the romance would be gone.”

Annie laughed at my humor, but still, you can see why we now prefer to use a five-gallon bucket out on the porch.  It is lined with a trash bag and topped with a camping toilet seat.  And you can also see why we are still eager to get the water from the spring plumbed into the cabin.

Yeah.

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Every time we visited Sweetwater, one of us would go to my slow-growing springhouse and clean out the leaves and twigs that had fallen or blown into it since the last time, clogging the pipe.  We tried covering the spring with plywood and a sheet of plastic weighted down with rocks, but that just didn’t work.  Wind, rain, and rising water in the creek would uncover the spring, allowing leaves and other trash free access.  When it uncovered the spring, it would transport the plywood and tarp down the creek.  One piece of plywood seemed to vanish entirely, as if into thin air.  We still haven’t found it.

Of course, leaves and twigs were not the only things that got in.  I frequently went to the enclosure to find crawdads, salamanders, frogs, or snakes had moved in.  Some I was able to grab or shoo out.  Others would make it under the rock shelf to avoid my efforts.  Most eventually disappeared but some still greet me when I visit, before diving under the bedrock.

I’ll tell you more about that in Part 2.  Talk to you then!

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