Fast and Furious Cold
Below-0 temperatures and more snow than we saw all last year came fast and fierce.
A couple of weeks ago, the temperature dropped from the 60s to the 30s.
Then, like the lamb market, it just kept falling, with no bottom in sight.
I blame it on my cousin.
The very weekend he visited the ranch for the first time, it rained and snowed for the first time this fall.
Coincidence? I think not.
He is from western Oregon, where humans have evolved to grow webs between their toes.
Flip-flops do not sell well in western Oregon.
Dark clouds follow Oregonians everywhere, not because Oregonians attract doom and gloom, but because their body heat magnetizes the oxygen atoms in H2O.
True story. Look it up.
My mom is from Oregon, too.
We call her the Snow Magnet.
She makes plane or train reservations months in advance of her trip.
For those months, north-central Montana will enjoy a normal weather pattern.
Suddenly, a week before I am scheduled to pick up my mom, the forecast changes -- sometimes predicting 3 to 4 inches of snow, other times we haul the snowshoes out of the garage.
Last week, while she was visiting, we piled up about 8 inches of snow.
The snow didn’t bother me much, but the deep freeze had me worried.
Last summer, I made an extremely short-sighted mistake when I installed my solar water system in a new pasture.
I intended to use that pasture only during the summer and early fall so I only buried the water pipeline a couple of inches.
Around here, reliable water pipes should be buried 6 feet deep.
Pumping is intermittent through about 30 feet of pipeline that lays horizontally between the tank and the pump.
That’s 30 feet of high-risk freezing.
My shortsightedness haunted me as I lay awake at night wondering how to protect that pipeline from the cold.
I gathered 28 worn-out tires and several bales of old straw, then laid both over the pipeline.
I hoped the black rubber would absorb some heat while the straw inside the tires would insulate the pipeline.
I was fairly confident of my patch job as long as temperatures remained above 15 degrees.
That night, the low was -6 degrees.
I knew I had to drain the water from that horizontal pipeline.
I blew air into the pipeline, with no way to know whether it would push the water all the way back down the well.
The next morning, I slid a wire into the pipeline, hoping it would not encounter an ice blockage.
About 12 feet into the pipeline, my wire stopped. I couldn’t get it any farther.
I flipped the pump switch off – I didn’t need to burn out the pump if water couldn’t flow -- and went home discouraged.
That night, I lay awake designing an alternative pipeline, one that would drain either to the trough or well.
My only solution involved arcing black plastic pipe through the roof of the well house and down to the tank.
To keep the new, airborne pipeline from sagging and creating pockets of potential ice, I stretched heavy wire from the well house to the trough and tied the black plastic pipe to the wire on a consistent slope.
Fortunately, I had a lot of yellow twine to tie everything together.
Cows milled around the tank, thirsty.
On a whim, before I connected the new pipe I decided to flip the switch, just to see what would happen.
The pump whirred.
Water spurted into the tank.
I now believe in miracles.
My mom plans to move to Montana permanently.
My cousin is always welcome to visit.
I think I’ll buy a snowmobile.
And more long johns.