I mentioned that during our first furlough I got into farming because Ellen’s older brother, Eric, shot himself in the foot. Her dad needed help to keep the family-farm running. My only qualification was that I had married his daughter.

Many of the daily tasks required very little skill, just the ability to work hard, all day long.

Of course we fed the cows at every milking. I first unloaded corn silage, climbing the rungs on the silo doors up to the first open one. I bent low to enter. The five horse Badger silo-unloader hung suspended by a cable, over 70 feet above me, since we were preparing to refill the silo in a few weeks. I used the large silage fork to remove a layer of the feed, counted the forkfuls, as I pitched the silage down the chute up which I had climbed. The five-foot pile that accumulated nearly blocked my exit. By wheelbarrow, I carried all the silage into the barn, pouring piles in the manger for each cow. I recalled that Ellen’s younger brother, Paul, had called farming, “moving piles”.

The cows were coming in from the pasture, milk dripping from their heavy udders. Each walked slowly down the long center walkway, sniffing to locate her own place. When satisfied, she stepped up clumsily, over the gutter, into her stall to begin eating silage.

Ellen’s dad knew the name of every cow, and any which chose her neighbor’s place, was forced to back down and re-directed to enter her own. One, he had named Butsey, always headed directly to the far end of the barn to see if she could get to the wheelbarrow full of grain I had ready to dispense. She was a heavy cow, mostly black with only a few white patches below her bulging sides and one white front leg. Her color pattern would never permit her to be a registered Holstein, and her milk production was too low, to even think of keeping her long term. She always made me think of what Ellen’s dad had said, “Around here it is produce or else”.

Each cow received the number of scoops of grain recommended by the DHIA, the Dairy Herd Improvement Association in New York. I soon learned the name of all the cows and the number of scoops of grain each received. The cows drank all the water they wanted from their individual water fountains. Pressing their noses down into the bowl caused the water to flow in as fast as they could drink it. Each cow drank between thirty and sixty gallons a day.

The water source at his farm was excellent, seemingly inexhaustible. I was to find out that a plentiful water supply was absolutely essential for farming.

By our second furlough we had purchased the old Jouben farmhouse, where Eric had lived, and were making it into our home. The limited house water supply came from a seventy-foot well drilled near the house.

For the barn, we used buried black plastic pipe to bring water down the hill from an old hand-dug well. To be a farm, we needed some animals, so we started with a few calves. Twin calves, Blacky and Whitey, weren’t wanted by our neighbor farmer so those became our first calves. Chai came a couple months later.

When Chai first came to Grandpa Paul’s farm she sucked her milk from a plastic bottle with a rubber nipple. She was small, since the bull was a Black Angus and the cow was a young black and white Holstein. The farmer wanted a small calf that would be born easily, so his first calf heifer would start making milk. He wasn’t interested in the small calf so we bought her.

The farmer gave us some of its mother’s colostrum from the first milking so the calf could gain her immunities and be healthy. We then bought a twenty-five-pound bag of medicated Calf Starter from the Van Hornesville Co-op and mixed the milk powder with warm water from the kitchen sink.

The little calf took to the nipple immediately and vigorously butted the bottle when it was empty, often knocking it from our daughter, Beth’s, hands. The calf then smeared her wet nose on Beth’s cloths, pushing and sucking, looking for more milk. She seemed to be thirsty, but the bottle was empty.

Chai grew quickly and needed more milk than could fit in the bottle. The sturdy calf-bucket we got from the Co-op was made of black rubber with a stainless steel handle and was designed to be indestructible. Beth had to climb up on a chair to lift the bucket up into the kitchen sink. We used warm water from the kitchen sink and mixed in two measures of powder.

It was a messy job teaching Chai how to drink from a bucket. She sucked vigorously on fingers wet with the warm mix, but didn’t like to have her head pushed down into the bucket. In theory she would follow the fingers into the milk, find the surface of the milk and start slurping when the two fingers were withdrawn. Instead Chai lifted her milky muzzle up so fast that she splashed milk on Beth and tipped about half of the milk out of the pail onto the stall floor.

Chai eventually got the idea and put her entire face into the bucket, coming up only for air, until there was no more milk. She then butted the inside of the rubber bucket and launched it across her pen. Apparently she was thirsty for more!

We got a bigger bucket. We used less and less milk powder and added more and more water. Eventually Chai grew up eating grass and hay, but she always needed water.

By then we had a stock tank fed by water from the old well up the hill behind the barn. That open well was hand dug down to the bedrock and was filled by water that trickled in at the bottom. It was only 25 feet deep and about three feet in diameter with rock masonry walls. Now, whenever Chai was thirsty, water was always available.

At the end of the hot summer that well went dry, and Chai bellowed out that she was thirsty. I didn’t dare take water from the house supply, as that was also low.

To fill the tank, I hauled barrels of water pumped up from Hayden creek at the bridge on Route 80. I needed to find a better solution since the creek wasn’t even visible in some places where it disappeared among the rounded rocks and gravel to emerge again in a pool downstream. The still water beneath the bridge would soon not be deep enough for my sump-pump.

Another hand dug well was located in the marsh not far from what had once been a house site near Weeks road. It might still have water in it. The water turned out to be clear and cold, delicious on such a hot day, but all sorts of trash had been thrown into the well and we needed to clean it out.

Using the sump pump, powered by an inverter, connected to the truck’s battery, we eventually emptied the well enough to lower a ladder down to the bottom. I went down to the bottom of the well and sunk into the mud and trash. The water was up near my waist. I pushed the ladder up to Ellen so there would be room for her to lower a five-gallon plastic bucket. The first few buckets she hauled up were mostly water, some of which slopped down on me.

Sitting on the rim of the bucket I was able to reach down to pick up old broken bottles and rocks from the muck to partially fill the bucket. After lifting the bucket up past my chest and overhead, Ellen pulled it the rest of the way to the top and emptied it again and again. I felt around with my bare feet to try to find any more debris that might damage the pump when lowered to the bottom of the well.

Ellen slid the ladder down along the wall of the well and I was then able to climb up to ground level. It had been cold down in there. We would find out the next day how high the water would rise in the well.

It came back up during the night. We had found water.

We fenced in an area and built an open shed facing south to get some warmth from the winter sun. The cows could find shelter from the Fall rains that we hoped would come. To provide water at the bottom of the hill, I set up a discarded bath tub connected through the drain to an old oil tank we buried in the ground to keep it from freezing. This would supply plenty of water for the cows, if I filled it daily.

I connected a hundred-foot length of 12-2 Romex wire, running through a plastic pipe, from the inverter in the truck to the sump pump, hanging down near the bottom of the well. I ran the truck engine to keep the battery charged when pumping water. I had raised Chai and it was my job to care for her thirst.

The system worked through the Fall. The well in the valley didn’t run dry. The cows found plenty of water in the tub under the old apple tree at the edge of the marsh. They came back up the hill to their shed where they ate the hay I hauled by wheelbarrow from the barn twice daily.

The system worked in the winter too, until a blizzard buried everything with a clean, wind sculptured, blanket of snow. The wind had carried the snow down the hill across the hayfield up over the snowbank at the edge of the road and dumped it. The Springfield plowing crew were working all night on the more traveled roads. Our gravel road was not a priority.

I shoveled my way to the barn, started the small Mitsubishi Bull tractor, and plowed a path to the road before breakfast.

When I went out again the snow had stopped and all was still and quiet. Absolutely beautiful! I could see the cows down the road looking expectantly for the man with the wheelbarrow stacked high with hay. Chai was the biggest one. It looked like they were fine. Curiously, the downwind side of the road was swept clean of snow.

Chai stood in shallow snow at the top of the hill by the shed. The cows had sheltered there during the night, but there was no trail leading down the hill to the water tub. The deep drift that filled the depression was unbroken, looking like the hill had shifted eastward.

I broke out the bales of hay on the snow for the cows to eat from the manger I had made. I started the parked truck and turned on the pump to fill the water tank below. Water flowed out the air vent sooner than usual. The cows must be eating snow since they couldn’t get to the water. Chai was not eating hay, just watching me. She bellowed to tell me something. I headed back home with the empty wheelbarrow, but heard her again before I got very far. Could she be thirsty and expect me to solve her problem? That big old helpless cow! Did she expect me to bring her water in a wheelbarrow?

I returned with a snow shovel to dig a path through that deep drift. Chai quit bellowing and stood behind me watching me battle with the snow. I figured she could at least wade through a couple feet of snow. The trench I was digging got deeper and deeper. No wonder the cows hadn’t broken a trail to the water tub last night. Chai followed right behind me. I kept shoveling.

I turned to see where Chai was and found that she had stopped. Certainly she could plow through that little bit of snow! When I dug down some more she came up right behind me.

Chai knew it was my job to get water for her. She was still thirsty. I eventually got to the tub.

The snow had partially buried the tub and the water had frozen on the surface, but the ice proved to be thin. It was easily broken. Using the shovel, I scooped off the slush and the dead brown leaves to clean out the tub. Water from the buried tank welled up from the underground tank. Chai’s thirst was satisfied.

I doubt Chai thought very much about being thirsty, though she certainly needed a lot of water to live. She was my cow and expected me to supply her need. Chai wasn’t very smart but she apparently recognized me and mooed out loudly when she was thirsty.

Why do people refuse to recognize that each man has in him a thirst to find meaning in life? When things are going well he tends to forget that he was created by God, and for God. Only God can satisfy the need He has placed in us for fellowship with Him.

Jesus said to the woman at the well, “whosoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.