My Grandad Smith had a small farm on a few acres in Pasco, WA. I loved our visits to Grandad's place when I was a child. He had a pasture behind the house that often had cattle or horses grazing on it, and when I was older, there were large pipes and sprinklers that irrigated that pasture. But I have memories of the original irrigation method my Grandad once used, back when I was still a very young toddler.
The Columbia River is the source of water that is used to irrigate the farmland around the Tri-Cities, WA. Before the canals were created for irrigation, all of that area was a semi-arid steppe, basically sagebrush-covered desert. Once the irrigation canals were built, water from the Columbia transformed parts of that desert into fertile farmland. One of the original irrigation methods was called pioneer irrigation. A piece of ground was sloped, and along the highest edge of that ground, water from canals ran in iron or earthenware pipes underground and came up into small basins formed in the earth at intervals along the high ground, with furrows dug from the downward side of those basins to let gravity usher the water into the pasture. There were no faucets to turn off and on. Instead, the canal water came up through a small pipe into the floor of each basin, and a wooden plug was placed into the hole at the bottom of the basin to stop the flow of water. When one wanted to water the pasture, one simply walked the high slope of that piece of land, removing the wooden plugs so the canal water would come up into the basin, and flow through the furrow down into the pasture.
Some of my favorite earliest memories are walking with my Grandad along the edge of his pasture, watching him lift the wooden plugs from the small basins of earth, and seeing the water bubble up from the ground through the hole where the plug had been. As I got old enough to pull up the plugs by myself, he would let me join in the act of making water magically appear out of the ground.
Many years later, after my Grandad had died and the sale of his property was pending, I had to make my last visit to his farm, to say goodbye to the place I loved most on earth. As I stood behind the house, looking across those few acres I loved, I suddenly remembered walking the edge of Grandad's pasture with him when I was very young. I wondered what might have happened to all those wooden plugs, which had become obsolete so many years ago. My adult feet carried me along the road at the edge of his pasture where my childhood soles had once walked alongside his large work-boots. Weeds and brush had grown up along the edge of the pasture where the irrigation line had been, but when I stopped and looked beneath one large sage plant, I could just make out the packed edge of one of the old basins, still there beneath the overgrowth. I started moving the brush aside, and that's when I spied one of the old wooden plugs, laying on the ground inside the dry basin. As I picked it up, I was filled with emotion from the memories it held. I finished walking the pasture edge, and at the end of that walk, I had found a total of eight plugs. I placed them in my car, then turned and reluctantly bid that property farewell.
When I got home, I set the wooden plugs on my counter, and wondered what I could do with them, in order to make something for myself and my children out of those special pieces of my childhood. I did not want to carve or sand or paint them. I felt that would destroy the magic I knew they still contained. Then it came to me: I could make crosses. So, I made four wooden crosses of the plugs, one for me, and one for each of my three children. I placed my cross above the front door of our home, and set aside the other crosses for each of my kids, to take with them whenever they flew my coop. Those crosses I set aside are all in the homes where my children now live, and my cross remains above the door of my house. It is a cherished object, two pieces of wood that still contain bits of earth from a place I loved, still contain traces of my tiny hands and the hands of my Grandfather.
As I took the cross down to take a close-up photo of it for this blog, I could feel the magic it still holds. I was transported back to a time long ago, when a tiny child walked beside a man in an Oklahoma Tuxedo, making water magically rise up from the ground. I cherish this cross.
