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Nothing I've ever done was more hoopie than my attempt to use an old waterbed mattress to water my garden during a drought in 2002.
Before repeating that tale, I should comment on the current summer drought, which has to be one of the longest on record. We got virtually no measurable rain through July and August.
"Radar shows rain right on top of us but nothing's getting through," my wife complained the other day.
Sometimes I think we'd be better off without weather radar on our cellphones, but we're addicted. A promising red or yellow line of rain on the screen would approach from the west, then split like the parting of the Red Sea, leaving us dry as the fleeing Israelites.
"Future" radar is even worse. It raises our hopes, only to fizzle out in the end.
I use a two-inch trash pump to irrigate my garden from the farm pond, which is itself a hoopie stratagem because it pumps like a fire hose, 98 gallons a minute. I have to mind the hose to keep from washing away the garden. Not having a nozzle, I use my hand to make it spray.
My trick of laying old carpet between some garden rows helps greatly. I can put the hose down on it and soak an area without washing erosion gullies.
What led me to try using a waterbed mattress for water transport during a dry spell twenty-some years ago was the fact that my trash pump could not force water to the farthest uphill part of the garden. It seemed a simple solution, and I wondered that I'd never heard of anyone trying it before.
I had an old waterbed mattress. I had a pump that could fill it in two minutes. I had a tractor and a flatbed trailer.
All I lacked was a connection between the two-inch discharge hose and the one-inch plastic fill valve on the waterbed. I gathered an odd assortment of items I thought might work, including PVC sink drain pipe, pieces of garden hose, an old bicycle tire tube, various hose clamps and a roll of used wrestling mat tape. (Son Worshrag, you may recall, was quite a wrestler, and we Millers never throw anything away, including mat tape that still had some stickum to it.)
Worshrag, who was 13 at the time, was minding the mattress while I started the pump.
You know, it is truly amazing how large a bicycle inner tube will get before it explodes. Worsh sustained only minor injuries.
Eventually I found a combination that worked, more or less, and we filled the waterbed mattress until it bulged like a giant plastic tick. That in itself I thought was a noteworthy accomplishment.
I put the tractor in first gear and began the haul up a gentle slope, looking back frequently to make sure all was well, and at first, all was. The waterbed mattress sloshed around a little.
Wait. Was it inching its way toward the back of the trailer? Too late I realized I should have made a tailgate to hold it in. With only a short distance to go, I thought I could make it before my giant bag-o-water creeped completely off.
Then we went over a little hump, and the waterbed came alarmingly to life: grotesque, unnatural life.
It rolled off the trailer and headed relentlessly downhill like a shapeless alien monster I remembered from a 1950s science fiction movie.
At age 8 I was scared to death by seeing "The Blob" (the 1958 original, not the remake) at the Hilltop Drive-In Theater. Steve McQueen, in his first leading role, tried frantically to warn the doomed townspeople. All they had to do was run, but no, they doubted, they dithered, they slipped and fell. One by one, they stuck to and were consumed by the shapeless, ever-growing, slow-moving glob from outer space.
My waterbed's method of locomotion was a slow roll that in retrospect was quite impressive to witness. As it picked up speed, flattening everything in its path, I leaped off the tractor and ran after it, with not the least idea of how to stop it. Thank God neither I nor Worshrag got in front of that one-ton steam-roller. My pickup truck was in the way, and fortunately the collision delivered all the force of a giant pillow. Had it not hit the truck, it would have leveled a seven-foot-wide swath through the garden, not stopping until it reached level ground down in the old pasture.
I pulled the plug. The waterbed mattress bled out and expired on the spot. Once again Mankind was saved from an unnatural monster.
Day after day in this summer's drought, Honey and I did everything we knew of to break it. We left our car windows open. She hung out laundry. I washed her car. I left chainsaws in the bed of my truck.
Nothing worked until last Thursday, when two of those little red blobs on radar, the only ones showing in the whole region, came and sat on us, delivering a full inch of rain in short, hard downpours. The earth sucked it in. We and all of Nature (at least locally) gave a big sigh of relief.
(Fred Miller's third book of stories, "A Dead Carp on Shadyside Ave." is $10, available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank's Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.)