Krsna says in Bhagavad Gita: I am the taste of water. What an essential element. Boy, I can tell you, after 2,5 month boondocking. Real off grid... Actually there was no scarcity of water at all. I was in anxiety that our pond will dry up in a hot summer.
And now it is already autumn and we have an endless supply of muddy water. How is that?
1st of all we are pumping from the ugly stream next to us.
Big improvement after pumping water from the disgusting pond.
At least no algaes. And some people are paying a lot of money for "healing clay". That reminds me of: "Because demoniac people want to be cheated, so many cheaters are present to cheat them. At the present moment in this age of Kali-Yuga, the entire human society has become an assembly of cheaters and cheated." (Srimad Bhagavatam 4.26.6).
It's like paying money for drinking water...
Driving the well
Finally we did the well drilling. Not real drilling. Primitive, stone age style. Pounding a 1 1/4" pipe into the ground. We made a huge tripod, but after almost cutting a leg (ok actually it was not that bad...) and some other almost emergencies, we decided to simply use a big chunk of wood.
Right, instead of having a heavy weight falling onto the well point, we were driving it down by hand - hit per hit, half a centimeter...
After several hundred strokes, we hit water. After only 7ft. Then it went down like nothing. 12ft. Enthusiastically I bought more pipe to go down to around 20ft. Buuuut...Everytime we attempted to pump with the hand pump.... Nothing coming. Instead there was a vacuum. That indicated that the well screen is clogged. Well, the whole thing has to be removed and cleansed. I had no clue how to do that, but we did it. Almost successful.
hydrocele - inside and outside
Meanwhile we are having water everywhere. Inside and outside of the motorhome.
I don't want to speak about that broken pump and all the water and mouse poop we found in the drawer. That really caused some headache. Growing pains when you want to become self sufficient and have no clue what you are doing 🙂
Outside it was raining a lot. Good thing for our plants. Especially now, that the irrigation pump is positioned at the forest stream.
And how much we like the sun again. Look at this beautiful rainbow.
Sun cannot be contaminated
Sometimes the people lament about this duality: hot - cold, sun - rain, why is there suffering in this world, how can god allow that... "There is no contamination for the sun. There is no possibility of the sun being contaminated, or the sun being dark." (Sri Isopanisad, 8).
The same goes for God. He is not responsible for our suffering or that we dislike the rain, which is giving us so much.
We are ultimately responsible for our destiny, which is only a result of past activities (karma). I don't know how bad we must have treated our houses in past lifes, that we are in the current situation 😀
Don't get me wrong. We are so blessed by all the knowledge and experiences we are able to obtain. But from a simple material viewpoint it is hard to appreciate for outsiders. Sometimes for us as well. But then, the sun shines again and we remember that there is no constancy in this material world, which is always full of suffering (dukhalayam asasvatam, BG 8.15).
That really sounds like the closing words.
Destroying the well
But let me quickly wrap up the water situation and how we messed it up.
While pulling out the pipe, we almost reached the well screen, but when I wiggled, to loosen the stuck well screen, one of the extra strong couplings was harder than the galvanized pipe. It broke at the threads. I thought it is lost. Buuuut, mayyyybe we can get it out with a lot of water from our muddy stream. How?
We can wash it out with a pipe that shoots water. A little jigsaw pattern on the bottom part and screwing movements will hopefully wash away all the soil around it.
Washed wells are much superior to driven wells. As we already have a shire endless water supply, a strong pump and almost all material, we HAVE TO try this!
Some people only need a few hours to reach 60ft depth at such beneficial ground conditions as we have. Very soft, no rocks, a lot of water around.
I'm tired for today. To be continued soon...
Comments
Good job! (:
Hari bol.
Your water well struggle reminds me of our own struggle to obtain the wet stuff when we first moved here to Khadigar farm.
We also didn’t have much money so we roughed for two years. we would haul drinking water from a neighbor about 1 mile away and my wife would walk about a 1/4 mile down hill to a cow pond to do the laundry. Sometimes the cows would get ahold of the clothes and chew on them, of course she would then have to do it all over. We would collect rain water for the our showers and irrigation. After awhile I dug a wet water well about 6-8 ft deep and used a hand pump to get the water out, it worked till it turned into summer and it then dried up. After that we saved our pennies and eventually got a well dug(drilled?). Around here a person has to go down about 250ft to hit good water and the the water comes up to about 100ft of the surface. Then all you have to do is hook up the juice, pay the electric bill and your good to go.
https://www.seeker.com/earth/conservation/these-ten-rivers-are-responsible-for-90-percent-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans
Since your post here is about water I thought that this would be a interesting read! I hope that you have good water now and are keeping warm up there. :>)
Varaha d.