Chapter 15: A Dog And A Dam

I had a great idea and thought of how nice it would be if we had us a lake of our very own. There were two low hills in our upper south pasture that gently sloped toward each other. A small gully had already formed where they came together.

It ran from the upper pasture to our stock tank just about five hundred feet south of the house. The livestock watered there from time to time during the day, both the horses and the milk cows.

One Sunday I looked out the kitchen window and in my mind's eye, I saw a lake. It was so real to me I felt I could almost reach out and touch it. It was a blue lake and there were catfish swimming around the bottom just waiting for me to catch them.

It was a great vision all right. Then I thought, I could build a lake like the one I imagined all by myself ... if Pa will let me. I went to him just a little afraid he would laugh at me or somehow belittle my great vision. Pa had never laughed or ridiculed me before, but I was still unsure how my idea would be received.

"Pa, would you let me build my own little pond in the south pasture? I want to do it right about there." I pointed to where the hills came together. "If I put in an earthen dam about there, just south of the stock tanks and make it about ten feet high, I could capture enough water to stock it with some cats and perch and sun fish and maybe a few good tasting snappers. Ma makes great turtle soup." I wanted to butter Ma up a little too and try to get her on my side. Kids seem to instinctively know how to play family politics almost from birth. I had all my arguments in a row.

"Sure Son, if you want to," he told me, "Just don't let it interfere with your regular chores or studies. Use the two spare teams and alternate. They need to do some work to keep 'em from getting too fat and lazy."

For some reason I felt a little frustrated. Here I had all these great persuasive arguments and Pa just said, "Sure." Talk about a let down, I almost felt cheated when I didn't get a chance to argue my case, even though arguments were unnecessary.

The year was 1934. This was the year I turned fourteen and still had my on again and off again one-sided feud with that snippy Betty May Henderson. She just couldn't seem to walk by me at school without making some mean or nasty remark. Even though she was the prettiest girl in school, she had the biggest mouth I decided.

I complained to Pa, "Why didn't you wait till I gave you my reasons? I put a lot of thought into why I figured it was a good idea and you just said 'sure' before I could even say anything."

Pa laughed and said, "You know the old saying about how great minds run along parallel tracks? Well, I was trying to figure out how to retain a little water right about there to take care of the stock and do a little irrigating. You know how the ground water level has been dropping. I think there's a worse drought coming, a bad one. I figured if we could have our own reserve of water, we'll be in better shape than if we just sit and later wish we had more water.

"Then I figured it might be a good way to irrigate the hay and cornfields to the west, just below that area. We could double our yield in those fields when the market goes back up. We better make it at least fifteen feet high and three times as thick as you had planned on. I'll work alongside you all I possibly can." With a short crew I figured Pa wouldn't have time to do much.

He added, "Since we had planted most of our acres in Alfalfa and Timothy for a hay crop neither one of us were as busy as we were the previous year. We only had two hundred acres in wheat and a hundred in corn. That wouldn't take much time to harvest at all."

"Great minds" had nothing to do with it. I wanted fish and Pa wanted irrigation water. Then I saw how we both had slightly different interests and goals and we both could get what we wanted from the same project. Everybody won and nobody lost. If Pa helped me, we would have it all completed by early fall.

What we did on Sunday afternoons after church and all other time we could spare from our chores was to use a four-horse team to drag Pa's version of a Fresno scraper blade. We moved as much dirt as we could per trip out of the low place where two hills came together at the back end.

We dumped the dirt where we wanted the dam at the other end of our artificial lake. It took so many round trips to make even a little progress I was afraid we would take forever to complete our project.

Then another problem popped up. When we got down about five feet in our scraping at the upper end of our little lake what had been an intermittent minor seep became a tiny trickle that kept growing. In the beginning the water seeped up through the ground and soaked right back in. This made it softer and easier to scrape out.

We scraped and dragged the dirt for our dam and worked to keep ahead of the seep. Ma didn't approve that Pa and I "broke the Sabbath."

Pa firmly quoted her the bible passage about the "ox in the mire," and also how it said in the bible that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, so her arguments subsided. In the meantime the seep became a stream. One day it broke loose and started to pour water down toward our incomplete dam.

I hated the time we had to take off for harvest. It was a year where there was very little for the Harvest crew to do. In fact Pa hired two of the men who regularly came to work for us during harvest to help me with the dam while he oversaw getting in the wheat and running the combine with his two big Belgians.

The two hired hands griped a little and showed in little ways they resented taking orders from a "snot nosed kid." However, when they saw the way I handled the Percheron teams the muttering stopped. Even as a boy I always got along good with animals and they seemed to work harder for me.

It sure didn't hurt any that the "snot nosed kid" was a little taller than they were. I already started to show I had inherited my pa's height and muscle.

Pa watched the skies and checked a couple of times a day on our progress. Later on he admitted to me, "Davy, I was real worried about the weather right then. I know others thought I was nothing but a dooms prophet, the way I kept telling them how we were in for a disastrous drought. It turned out that I had no idea just how bad things were going to be."

It was hard going to properly construct our dam. The red clay soil, called "red hardpan" was difficult to scrape, even with the help of the seep. A few times, when the going got too hard, we used a mixture of fertilizer and coal oil to create our own home made explosives to blow up stubborn areas we couldn't get loose by just scraping alone.

At last on the day we called it complete, we had a dam a bit over a hundred feet across at the top, almost sixteen feet at its deepest point. Pa figured the dammed up water would go back close to a tenth of a mile or more.

It was not an impressive lake by any professional's standards, yet it looked plenty big enough for our needs. In fact, it was a lifesaver one year later when the drought hit us with a vengeance for the first time. Ours was one of the few farms with water during the following terrible dry season Pa had accurately prophesied. Of course we shared what we could with our neighbors.

We started this "little project" almost two years after I gave that big cat fish to the Hendersons. However the fortunate thing was that the rain mostly held off all summer while we were working "my project" as Pa called it. He always praised me for my vision. I loved working with my father. He always made me feel valuable, as if my thoughts on any matter were important.

Then, the week the dam was finished, we got a gully washer and a half. One thing we were not quite aware of until right then was how the lay of the land gave us a natural runoff from the south and the east. This added greatly to the rainfall in the area and our new dam retained it all.

The seep was one indicator of how we may have succeeded well beyond what we had originally planned on. And since we were new to the dam building business, we had no idea what we had accomplished.

I went up the day after the heavy rain and came running back yelling at the top of my lungs, "Pa. Ma. We got us a lake. I mean we got us a real big one starting up there!"

Pa came up to praise my efforts and just stared in awe when we got there. "Davy boy, you are just a foot short of amazing. This is almost a miracle." The natural vee contours of the two hills we placed the fill dirt between was deceptive.

There before us was a lake of water curving outward slightly on both sides as it went back. It was a good three hundred feet across at its widest point. We had almost twice the water captured we planned on. It went from an inch deep at the upper end to nearly eight feet in depth at the deep end.

"Ain't it beautiful, Pa?" Oh I was so proud.

"Don't say ain't, David," Ma said.

"Yes ma'am," I answered

"It surely is, Son. But I do believe we may have succeeded a might too well."

"What do you mean, Pa?" I asked. I had a sinking feeling our project was threatened. I didn't know why, but I was afraid Pa was going to say, "Tear it down."

"Well, Davy, we got this much run off from just one single hard rain. What is going to happen when it rains again and again? Your dam might get washed away."

He shook his head, "I believe we had better add two sluice gates with concrete spillways. It won't take too many bags of Portland cement to do the job and I'll help you. We'll keep the two men on a while longer and see what we can do to finish this job off right. I do believe this is a good example of almost having too much of a good thing, way too much.

"You really think it's necessary, Pa?"

He laughed, "Well son, it is if we want to keep on living in our house. I wasn't aware of just how much water would run off out of the south pasture. Davy, I think we want to get the county agent out here to see just what we got, maybe even the government man, the hydrologist. We just might have succeeded beyond anything you were thinking about doing, or me either."

Later we found out what we called a "seep" was in reality an underground stream. Water flowed through it most of the year. When we scraped away the hard pan at the weakest point, the underground stream began to add its water into our new dam. It also fed water to our dam faster than natural drainage and evaporation would get rid of it.