The Windmill

The Windmill


You can hardly find a windmill any more, but in the 1950's almost all farms not only had one but needed one.

When I moved to the farm in Hokah, Minnesota with my mother and her new husband, we were a mere decade into what was called "rural electrification."  Prior to that time, farms out in the hills simply did not have electricity.  Like Grandma Lill's and Grandpa Lee's parents, people made do without it.

They had lanterns and candles and they limited their activities to the daylight hours as much as possible.  They had hand pumps that brought water up to a spigot.

And they had windmills to draw water for the farm animals.

There was a windmill on the side hill above the barn at Al Botcher's farm, but the electric lines had reached out to Pfeffer Valley and it was no longer in use.  An electric pump drew water for the house and for the tank in the cow yard.

That didn't mean that I couldn't have a lot of fun with the windmill.

Basically, a windmill is a tower which reaches up a hundred feet or so into the air.  At the top, a fan of metal blades is mounted on a wheel.  The wind turns the wheel.  Think of the pedals of a bicycle mounted on the center of the wheel.  As the wheel goes around the pedals go around in a much smaller circle with it, but more importantly they go up and down.  Attached to one of the pedals is a long metal rod which hangs all the way down, nearly to the ground.  The rod is going up and down when the wind is blowing, and it is simply attached to a pump handle and now the pump handle goes up and down, just as if you were standing there working it.

The well below the windmill is a large pipe which has been driven or drilled deep into the ground until it encounters the water table.  Inside the large pipe, a smaller version of the rod continues all the way down into the water far below.  Attached to the rod every few inches are "leathers".  Think of pliable little unbrellas which are facing down into the well.

When the rod goes down, the water in the pipe pushes the umbrellas closed.  As it is being pulled up, they open and pull water with them.  The water travels from one umbrella, or leather, to the next until it reaches the top and gushes out a spigot and ultimately into a storage tank.

Because the tank is located up on the side of a hill, gravity then brings the water down a pipe to the house or barn.  The pressure of the water at the bottom is dependent upon the size of the tank up on the hill, the amount of water in it, and the diameter of the pipe coming down, but our ancestors weren't pressure-washing their cars.  They were darned happy just not to have to carry the water around in pails to make coffee with or water the livestock with.

The rod on Al's decrepit windmill hung about three feet off the ground and there was no pump left to hook it to.  The well was capped.  But I could hang on to it and have the wind lift me up and down.  That was good fun for a little while, but then there is the tower itself.  A metal ladder is built right into the tower because once in a while something goes wrong.  The rod comes loose, or a storm damages the fan blades, or the bearing on the wheel needs greasing or replacing.

I never could summon the courage to climb more than twenty five or thirty feet up the ladder.  The whole thing was creaky and scary, but it was very relaxing to sit in the shade of the windmill and the weeds growing around it and gaze off into Pfeffer Valley stretched out below.  If there was a breeze the metal groaned as the ancient machine tried to do its work even though it was not hooked up anymore.

I would lay in the sun-warmed alfalfa and timothy and watch the clouds and the birds, surveying my little empire, the great outdoors.

I remember sitting beneath the windmill when I was a bit older.  Some movement caught my eye and an object about a half mile distant appeared from the highest clouds on my left and traced a gliding arc to the topmost edge of the farm fields on the neighbor's farm on my right almost where they met the woods of the ridge.

It was over in a couple of seconds and then everything was normal and still.  A UFO, I thought to myself, in alarm!

My mouth fell open as I contemplated that it might be an actual flying saucer that landed way over there and that the inhabitants might be pouring out into the woods.  I don't remember mentioning it to anyone, but I refrained from hiking over to that ridge which was actually a short cut through the fields to some friends I knew on a farm in the next valley.  By this age I had seen one or two science fiction films like The Blob and there was no way I was going over there!

Since no alien invasion occurred, the whole incident receded into the lower levels of importance in my mind and I eventually chalked it up as just a great unsolved mystery.  In retrospect, I think it could have been ice dropping from the wing of a high flying airliner or even the metal door that closes over the landing gear when it is pulled up into the wings or fuselage.

For the first couple summers and autumns, my play was limited to the outbuildings of the farm and the fields that I could easily access, such as the hillside with the windmill, or the little valleys that water ran down in the spring to the neighbors downstream.  I needed transportation to go very far and to get into much mischief.  The beginnings of that transportation were my bare feet on the gravel road or through the thistles in the fields. But this was going to change shortly.