LIFE ON A BARREL A YEAR
We are all concerned with energy consumption these days. Not long ago, I wrote a response to those who would attempt to exploit oil resources in sensitive areas, and included data on how much oil we consume as a nation (See: “Drill Baby Drill”: rjkspeaks.blogspot.com, October 17, 2011). I noted there that each day, our nation consumes nearly 19 million barrels of oil! (See the CIA
factbook to check that number at:https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2174rank.html) In Drill Baby Drill, I state that if those 19 million oil barrels were aligned end to end, they would form a continuous line more than 10,400 miles long which would stretch from the North Pole to the tip of South America and then some. We burn it all up each day and blithely pump the waste products of combustion into the world-atmosphere as oxides of carbon and nitrogen. These substances have an effect on the world climate and they rightly have us and the rest of the world seriously worried.
In a recent edition, The Economist magazine (October 20, 2011) pointed out that a recent compilation of world temperature records, (by Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Group, led by
Berkeley University physicist Richard Muller) seem to have put to rest much of the real and imagined controversy regarding this issue. The Economist's editors (not a left-progressive group) state that there is now little question concerning the validity of global warming. This latest compilation of terrestrial weather station data going back many years clearly indicates a slow rise in temperature over the decades with a sharp rise of 0.9 degrees C (nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit) in the last twenty years.
Elements within our government, as well as industry and business leaders have resisted acceptance of the fact of massive, fossil-fuel-induced climate change. These business and
government elements wish to avoid the dire and difficult alternatives, i.e. the need to use less fossil fuels and decrease business activity (as they see it), or face a drastically altered world with increased crop failures, seasonal wildfires, more frequent violent tropical storms, intense winter cyclones, disaster floods, and widespread famine for the near-future. But now after this recent analysis it appears there is little doubt that to curb the warming trend and change the inflection of the rising temperature curve we will have to radically alter our oil consumption habits.
So how do we fare here in the US on this issue? Would great changes in our habits and consumption be required? Recent data from the Energy Information Administration (
EIA) indicate that US energy consumption from about the 1980s to 2006 remained fairly steady, with each US citizen, on average, consuming 336 million
BTUs per person. ( Note: A British Thermal Unit (BTU) a traditional measure of energy defined as the amount of heat energy needed to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.) Three hundred thirty-six million
BTUs is nearly five (5) times more than the world average energy consumption per person (recently tabulated at about 72 million
BTUs). So here in the USA we can be considered to be the world’s energy hogs.
Our total energy consumption includes sources such as petroleum, coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, and some wind power. According to the
EIA (for 2007) of all our energy sources, petroleum is the largest, comprising about 39% of the total. But for this present analysis we can best visualize our consumption if we focus on how we use petroleum. Let's consider the 19 million barrels of oil consumed in the USA each day, thus we use (19 x 365 days per year = 6935 million barrels) close to 7 billion barrels a year. Dividing that figure (7 billion bbl/year) by the US (2010) population of 308 million (7000m/308m = 22.7bbl/person/yr ) reveals that we use approximately 23 barrels of oil per/person/year.
To summarize, we can state that in recent times, (ignoring the other sources of energy we use) we as Americans, with a population of less than one-third of a billion, or about 20% of the world population (2011 world population seven (7) billion), use
five times more oil energy than the world average. We each consume collectively an average of about
23 barrels of oil per day. With those figures, the USA (as the primary
per capita consumer) should be in the forefront of moderating our usage of fossil fuel, if anything is to actually happen to improve world consumption of fossil
fuels and slow world climate change. Unfortunately, here in the USA, our government in the grasp of the giant oil companies, we remain largely in the denial stage.
Reflecting on the fact that each of us use as much as 23 barrels of oil each year, I could not but help thinking six decades back to a
childhood experience of living on my grandfather's small farm in rural Long Island where we used only one barrel of oil annually. I still have a vivid image of grandpa's single barrel of "
kero" sitting in front of his old woodwork shed. That was the sole source of petroleum energy in his annual economy of those long ago days. (Also
notable was that one barrel of
kero was probably also a wholly domestic product--unlike today, when more than six out of each ten barrels of oil product are imported from abroad.)
So as an exercise in examining how much our consumption has changed over the years, I invite my readers to accompany me on a brief trip into the early part of the last century, when life was much simpler and at least in a rural environment a small family could survive quiet nicely on
one barrel of petroleum-product over the entire year.
In the late 1940s, the growing fear of the infantile paralysis epidemic in NYC reached crescendo proportions,
especially in Brooklyn, NY, where I lived. The prior summer, 1947, when I was seven years old, two of my school mates were struck down with polio and were whisked away from their families, to be treated and put into
quarantine in a distant hospital and not to be seen again in the neighborhood. My mother was understandably anxious for my health as the summer of 1948 approached. She and my father quickly made the only arrangements she could, and so like the rich kids who lived north of 13
th Avenue in
Dyker Heights whose business-owner and professional parents sent them off to summer health-camps, just before the summer of 1948, I was sent to live in the country too. I spent the next few summers of my young childhood as a kind of happy refugee from the city.
My elderly grandparents, who spoke English fluently, but preferred to speak (even to me) in their native Italian, lived a simple country life on a small freehold in what was rural Long Island of that time. I concluded many years later after traveling in Europe that their lives during my stay in 1948 were closer to that of 19
th century Europe, than America of mid-20
th century. So life there for me was like going back some some fifty or sixty or more years into the past. Thus my observations are not typical of the ways of the 1940s, but more of an earlier age. Still my observations can add to one's appreciation of how simply all our ancestors once lived and how little they depended on the oil which has become today our lubricant, fuel and near-lifeblood. Later, as an adult, I came to realize how much that time away had affected my perceptions and my life. I often looked back with great respect and affection for my grandparents, who welcomed me and shared their lives with me. The experience gave me a perspective which few others my age had and it and afforded me the
unique experience of a real-life window into earlier times.
Grandfather stored his yearly oil supply in a great, old, copper barrel, located at the end of the long, gravel, driveway. The 50 gallon round-bellied barrel lay on its side on a weathered, rough-wood frame in front of grandpa’s equally-weathered work shed. The barrel's greenish-tinged surface had a few dents here and there. Abrasions could be seen all along the the thick, rolled-metal rim, where the reddish copper metal shone through. The spigot, situated about ten inches off the ground, had a well-worn solid-brass handle and below it a curved copper spout. The marks of wear and dents suggested to even my young mind that the barrel was old and must have had a long, former life somewhere else and probably far away. Directly below the spigot a bare spot in the grass indicated that the spout must have dripped during use, causing a few drops of kerosene to splash to the ground. The spattering kerosene killed the grass in a near perfect circle leaving a
persistent patch of barren, gravelly soil among the otherwise rank weeds and grass which grew luxuriously around the barrel-frame and along the rough stone foundation of the weather-beaten old shed.
To a young imaginative boy, the barrel's smooth, sun-warmed rounded surface suggested the wide back of a big dray horse, and sometimes, when I was alone, I would mount up my "horse" for a ride, thumping my heels into the hollow metal sides to goad my "barrel-horse" into an imaginary gallop and down grandpa's driveway. I never gave a thought to the substance within. Oil was of only minor if common use at that place and time. Grandpa was more concerned with the local fire-wood we collected from the orchard and the surrounding woods.
I certainly could not imagine the all-powerful, all-engrossing role that the smelly liquid in the belly of my play-
horse would come to play in all our lives in the decades to come.
The small farm was basically self-sufficient--except for the kerosene we burned. Benzene (as grandpa called it) was used mostly as as the fuel for our lamps, and lanterns, but sometimes too, it served to thin paint, or to clean up after a painting job, or even as a
degreaser. On occasion an old coffee cup-full was also used to start a stubborn wood fire in wet weather, or for what I liked to watch best -- to start a bonfire. Grandpa did have a small kerosene stove which he sometimes used to as a space heater in the house on very cold winter days, and in the spring he moved it to the chicken coop for the new
hatchlings. But not much else. The barrel was filled only once or at most twice per year. Grandpa got along in 1948 with very little oil, or as he called it "benzene".
Looking back at our energy use in 1948, I calculate that my grandpa, myself and my grandmother, the three of us (ignoring the many guests including my parents who arrived for short stays during the summer) each consumed only a little more than one-third of a barrel of kerosene--mostly for lighting. The energy in each barrel of kerosene is, as is petroleum, rated at about 6 million
BTUs. Thus, each of us in that year of 1948 consumed only 2 million
BTUs of oil-product per year. That is only a small fraction (less than 1%)of what we use today (336 BTU) or even small compared to the the world average at 72 million
BTUs per year.
LIFE ON TWO MILLION
BTUs PER DAY
What was my life like in that place in 1948? Perhaps revisiting that time may broaden our understanding of how people lived on only one-third of a barrel of oil a year, rather than 23 barrels a year as we do today, and too, generate an appreciation of how dependent upon oil our lives have become in a time span of little more than six decades.
The pleasant, five-room bungalow, with a great open attic, had no indoor plumbing, no electricity and no heating or air conditioning, and no wood-fireplace. Our water-well was outside too. I recall that the interior was mostly cool and comfortable in summer and warm in winter. Although the attic where I slept was hot in a summer's mid-day, during the night at that time of the year its high roof and big windows kept it cool and comfortable. The overarching shade trees and a lovely apple tree which poked its branches up to my attic window must have
helped to moderate its temperature too.
Fresh drinking water of the finest taste and purity was pumped up from deep underground in our back yard. A long-
handled cast-iron lift-pump, gave access to fresh, icy cold, water from, as grandpa would proudly and often proclaim, "a hundred and twenty feet down". The pump was relatively new in 1948. Prior to its installation, grandfather had to depend mostly on the cistern's rain water, for washing and cleaning, but for good drinking water he had to tow his little frame wagon a half-mile up St.
Johnland's Road to fill them at the a
rtesian well located there. When guests with automobiles arrived, he would readily impose on them for this chore. Though I never witnessed it myself, I heard tell of my aunts and uncles strapping the water jugs to the running boards of their vehicles for the ride up to the free-flowing spring across from the pond.
All lighting was by candle or kerosene lamps. There were no street lights either. On an dark evening to visit the home of
grandfather's boyhood friend, "Lo
Zito" , grandpa, with me tagging along, carried a big kerosene lamp which swayed as we walked casting scary shadows in a great spreading a circle of yellow light all the way for the quarter mile distance in pitch-black darkness over sandy roads. Cooking and house-heating was accomplished with wood burned within a big, black, cast-iron kitchen stove. In the summer, and the warmer seasons of the year, a similar outdoor stove was put into operation outside the house under the big grape arbor.
Grandpa loved to garden and grow flowers and grandmother preserved fruit from their fruit trees and vegetables from their garden. The dried and split wood from the orchard trimmings and from the surrounding forest fueled the wood stove for all their fruit and vegetable canning and food-
preservation activity. They both loved to read and listen to classical music and Italian opera. But with no electricity, reading occurred by
cozying up under the yellow glare of the big kerosene lantern, and music appreciation with the aid of a wind-up
gramophone.
The subsistence farm supplied us with meat, eggs and vegetables. Fresh brown eggs were a great staple, and each week grandpa killed a hen which edged past her prime egg-laying capacity. Some years they also raised a pig or two. An let me not forget the rabbits which were kept in a hutch attached to the back of the chicken coop. But the vast majority of our meals came fresh directly from the big garden in summer.
When we walked to town (the only way to get there), we often pulled grandfather's home-made wood-wagon upon which we piled our purchases. Sometimes, on the way back, if there was room, grandfather offered me a ride. On our way to town, we passed the local dairy farm where we might stop to purchase farm-fresh
un-
pasturized and
un-homogenized milk. For this purpose we carried our own metal milk jug with a tight fitting metal cap which the dairyman filled for us. (Today that farm is long gone and its are fields filled with houses. But the big maple trees along the road remain, but each time I pass there
I can still envision in my mind's eye the big old house with its barn and wide barnyard.) If the weather was warm on these trips to the dairy farm, we covered the milk-jug with a wet towel to help keep it cool on the walk back home. Arriving home, the filled milk jug was placed on the top of the ice block in the bottom of the ice-box, and there it kept sweet for a few days.
Grandfather made his own wine from grapes he grew on the big grape arbor attached to the house. These were dark blue and juicy New York Concord grapes, the
vinifera varieties were not thought able to survive on Long Island at that time. He also ingeniously distilled brandy from the wine he produced. He roasted his own coffee, and ground the roasted beans in a hand grinder fresh when they were needed. (During the roasting process, one of my boyhood chores was to help keep the small stick-fire under his coffee roaster going by adding little dry
twigs in a regular manner, while grandpa rotated the squeaky roaster handle. The cylinder-a
xle squealed and scraped
rhythmically, punctuating the sound of the beans sloshing around
nosily within the roaster . Every now and then, grandpa would remove a few hot, smoking bean from a small sliding door on the side-wall of the roaster to test for color and flavor. He would crush a bean between his fingers and bring it up to his nose for a sniff. The smell of roasting coffee beans was intoxicating to me then and the scent of roasting beans bring back to mind those days sitting in the shade of the grape arbor roasting green coffee beans with grandpa. He also made his own pasta and daily, grandmother baked her own crusty Italian-style bread. They put up jars and jars of tomatoes, pickles, peppers and other vegetables which lasted them all year long. Their lives were busy and well directed. There was no boredom or question of ‘what do I do next’.
As each day wound down, and night descended grandpa would go out to the big kerosene barrel and fill a small, metal, beaked-jug. With the fill-jug in hand, he made his rounds to each of the big kerosene lamps and lanterns in the house. He would top up the each oil reservoir if necessary. At each one, he removed the glass globe and rolled up the oil-soaked cloth-wick to trim off the burned section neatly with a small scissors he kept for that purpose. Each wick had to be cut perfectly square so it would burn evenly and brightly at night. Each globe was cleaned with crunched up newspaper too. If the flame burned properly, the glass globe stayed nice and clean from day to day. At night, reading at the kitchen table, or writing a letter home to mom and dad, I was cautioned to not turn the wick up too high, for it would make a smoky flame which blackened the inside of the globe.
There was no town garbage collection in those days. Trash from the house was separated into edible food-waste, compost, or burnable stuff. The food waste was fed to our dog, or the chickens, or dumped into the hog pen. The other materials were either composted, burned or buried. But then again in those pre-packaging days there was not much solid waste. Clear plastic, styrofoam, cellophane and such eith had not been invented yet or was not widely used. Everything that could be used for some other purpose was used again, and sometimes again, after that second use. As noted above our food scraps were separated into meat and vegetable and offered to either our great big, white Italian Spitz dog named“Beauty”, or tossed to the chicken flock. Since these jobs were mine I soon learned that chickens would eat almost anything. When a pig inhabited the small hog pen, it shared in the waste food and vegetable trimmings too. Anything not considered edible by man or beast, but was organic in nature was either tossed onto the manure pile to decompose or slipped into the kitchen wood stove to add to the heat that was boiling the water in the boiling pot.
There was no “food packaging”
per se, so there was little waste of that sort. Old newspapers and a few cardboard boxes were the most common paper products. But the former were often used for packaging, where today we would use some form of plastic bag,
while the latter was often saved up in a basket next to the stove to be used to start the wood-fire in the fire box. The few other packaging materials we did come across were often recycled or reused some way. For instance, the nice cloth sacks from the bags of chicken-feed were saved to be made into smaller sacks for storage, or cut and sewed into long sand-filled "sausage rolls" to block cold air seeping under the the back door in winter, or ripped and cut into patches to repair the knees of my worn overalls. Burlap was a common coarse fabric and we often saved such bags for our trips to the beach for bagging our mussels and clams. Jars and cans were kept for storage containers. Wire from the hay bales was carefully
wound up and saved for other uses. String was rolled into balls. And even the "silver foil" in which grandpa's pipe tobacco came packaged was saved too.
Grandpa was quite a good tinsmith and would use old tin cans to create other new and useful things with the waste metal. He made a lovely and functional handle and latch for the shed out of a large tin can. He famously made a very fine coffee roaster from waste sheet metal and several large waste tin cans.
Manure and chicken droppings and the straw bedding from the chicken coop and the pig pen were piled behind the coop for composting. Corn husks and coarse plant stems and the remains of my garden weeding chores were placed on that pile too. I recall seeing grandfather out in the vegetable garden and around his especially-loved
Cleome flower-beds early in the morning carrying his own extra-tall bedroom potty. He sometimes used
night-soil (from the night-potty) on some of his favored flowers and even in the vegetable garden. In the latter place he would plow a special trench some distance away from the corn row, or the tomato row where he would sometimes use this fertilizer on plants he considered to have “special needs”.
There were only a few items that could not be burned for fuel, composted, or fed to the dogs, pigs or chickens. When something of this category had to be disposed of there was no other option but burial. Every now and again grandpa had to dig a hole to dispose of something he could not recycle. But it was not too often. As a teenager coming back to visit the old folks, I was saddened to be witness to the scene of our old ice box meeting that fate. This event occurred many years later when the house had been electrified and the old ice box had been replaced with a refrigerator. The ice-box held its own in its old spot for several years, serving as bug-and-vermin-proof container for flour and grains, but finally it had to be disposed of. Grandpa simply had a hole dug big and deep enough for the ice box dug and slid it down there. Of course he had one of my younger cousins remove all the wood-trim and
usable screws and hardware first. I was sorry to see it go. But that was late in the 1950s and well after the time I consider here.
That old ice-box with it two heavy doors and wood trim was for obvious reasons used more in summer than in winter. In winter the screened-in back porch became the refrigerator and the ice-box was used to store other items (as noted above). In summer, it kept our fresh milk cold and sweet, a few pieces of cheese and a few other items such as perhaps a bucket of fresh
blowfish grandpa and I caught off the "pier" on the
Nissequogue, or some special cuts of meat that needed storage before being prepared to eat.
Ice for the ice-box was delivered to the farm in big rectangular blocks on a regular weekly basis. In summer, the ice man's arrival was a great attraction for me and my cousins and neighbor's kids. We gathered under the shade of the great maple tree in front of grandpa’s house on hearing the rumble of the ice truck coming up the road. Joe Lombardi, the ice-man, always chose a nice shady place to park his truck, where his delicate cold-cargo would be shaded from the sun’s direct rays. He chased us kids away from the back of the turck as he pulled back the heavy damp cloth covers and canvas that protected the great blocks of ice. Then, like a surgeon going to work, he reached for his ice pick held in a special holster on his belt and rapidly pricked out a line on the dark ice with fast deep punctures. At each strike of the point small ice chips flew into the air as the pick made holes with radiating cracks in the dark-blue ice. Some chips flew up into the air and some larger ones always fell at our feet on the sandy road. These we quickly picked up to squeeze in our warm hands so as to melt the ice into cool water that carried away adhering sand. Then we thrust the cold chunks of melting solid into our mouths, laughing and smiling with difficulty and delight.
With our mouth's full of ice, our eyes followed big Joe's flashing ice pick. The cracks in the ice connected up and soon the small block fell away--often releasing new chunks of fractured ice, which we quickly gathered up. The big burly man then scooted us out of the way again, as he reached for the two-handled ice tongs hanging on the back of the truck. He grasped grandpa's ice block with the tongs and rolled the glassy soild up on to his leather-padded shoulder. We followed him into the house, watching the drips of melt-water slither down the leather pad on his back. I followed him as he carried it through our back porch and into the kitchen. There he placed it in the ice-box which had been cleared and ready for it.
After Joe left, grandpa piled any remnant pieces of ice from last week's delivery on top of the new, sharp-edged, fresh block, and covered them both with a thick
layer of newspaper. The paper slowed down the melting process. Then, he replaced the items that had to be kept very cold, placing them directly on top of the damp newspapers. The ice melted and absorbed heat from the food and milk. The dull-gray, tin-lined interior had a little hole at the bottom where melt-water was directed away, through a small rubber hose that passed through a small hole in the floor boards, where the melt-water dripped down into the sandy crawl-space under the house. The big, thick ice-box door was closed tight and kept that way. Nosey eight-year old-kids were not allowed to poke their heads in there.
Once,when the rubber ice-box drain became blocked, grandma asked me to crawl down there to clean the tip. For that purpose, I carried a long piece of straw (to clear the tube) and a nice beef bone to offer to Beauty (whose realm I was invading). I found the the hose-end laying in the little wet spot it created. Some gunk blocked the opening which I cleared away. Crawling back out I had to slip below, a dusty two-inch-diameter galvanized metal pipe which sloped from the floor above and entered into the ground near the cover of the concrete cistern. There too, was a two-inch vertical pipe which I recognized as the pipe which connected to the sink pump directly above. I knew about the cistern, but I had not seen this part of it before.
The Cistern
When the house was built in the 1920s there was no source of water near-by. Later, as noted above, the deep water well was dug in the back yard near the screened in back-porch. [Potable water
was available from an artesian well just off of St. Johnland Road, (across from Harrison Pond) about a half-mile from the house. In those days grandpa would pull his wagon down there and load it up with jugs of cold (52 degree F,) clean, fresh water. Guests who arrived by auto would be encouraged to add to the water supply by carting water jugs and filling them at the artesian well. I visited that old well in the 1960s and it was still pumping plenty of cold clear water.] So for those reasons a cistern to collect rain-water had been built under the house and a utility sink and a hand pump was installed in the kitchen and connected to the rain water cistern for cooking, cleaning dishes, washing up and sometimes for clothes-washing. (Major washing of clothes was carried on outside in a big tub with a brown soap and a wash board. The waste water from those operations was dumped on in the garden or in the orchard next to a deserving tree. And the clothes were all dried on a clothes line strung from one big tree to another. Clothes were kept in place with wooden clothes pins.) The squeaky hand pump in the kitchen had a straight line pipe directly into the rain-water cistern below the house from which it pumped water into the kitchen sink. But it required to be primed with water first before it would pump any fluids up. For that purpose, a jug of water always sat on the side board of the kitchen sink. You poured water into the well in the top of the pump, then worked the handle up and down until gradually you would hear the water rise in the pipe and pour out through the square end of the spout and spash noisily into the base of the metal sink. Then it would gurgle down the drain which connected to a pipe that carried the waste water out into a low-spot in the orhard. Where it soaked into the ground.
“This is cistern water. Don’t drink it," grandpa warned me. But being a curious eight-year-old, I had to try it. I knew it was rain water and I had tasted rain drops and melted snow. So I just assumed it was OK to drink. I pumped some up into an old jelly jar glass and looked at it. It was clear and clean. It smelled fine too. It was cold and tasted good to me. So I never heeded grandpa’s warning, and when no one was looking would drink the cistern water regularly if I was inside and thirsty. I never had any bad digestive effects to my knowledge. Of course, the deep well-water, which pumped cold water up from 120 feet deep was the best, especially in the summer. It was cold enough to frost up a glass jug. The pump was relatively easy to operate even for a small boy since the pump-handle was long and the 120 feet or so of rods were of a light wood. Every now and then grandfather's well-man came to service the pump and "pull the rods" so as to replace a small leather valve at the bottom of the length of rods.
Before the house was built, grandfather had to construct the cistern six feet deep and six or eight feet in diameter. From his own account he and his sons (my two uncles) hand-excavated the cistern and laid up the bricks. They lined the interior with concrete and built a tight fitting wood frame cover which sealed it from the outside, and only then was the house built over it. This pool-like container was connected to the roof gutters by the pipe I describe above. I discovered how it was operated one day when a summer thunderstorm forced us to seek shelter indoors.
Grandpa and I were out in the orchard, where I was helping him (or really just watching) as he prepared to graft two branches of one type of an apple tree onto another. The stock tree was a well-grown Red Delicious twelve-foot apple tree at the time and grandfather had cut off a three-inch diameter main branch at about eye level (his). The cut was neat and horizontal. He then split the stock branch in two with a small sharp metal wedge. He then took two small branches taken from a neighbor’s Golden Delicious tree. “This tree will have two types of apples,” he explained, as he sliced the base of each finger-thick branch into a very thin wedge, which would fit neatly into the split in the branch of the stock tree. He aligned the branches in the wedge so that their bark would match up with the bark of the stock tree. Then as he tied the whole branch around with twine and as he applied some thick substance to seal the stub of the branch the sky darkened and a breeze rustled the leaves along the ground.
“It’s going to rain, Poppy,” I said, looking skyward.
“Yes it is!" he said, gathering up his tools. "Let’s get into the house, perhaps it will rain enough to fill that cistern today.”
With the wind whipping the leaves on the apple trees to show their undersides we rushed toward the back porch. As we passed through the portal and the screen door slammed closed behind us, a great thunderclap boomed from the darkend sky, as if to emphasize the threat of rain. Big rain drops slammed into the sandy bare soil of our back yard, each forming a little impact crater with a tiny mud ball at its base. Outside, I watched our big white Italian Spitz, ‘Beauty’, hurridly raise himself up out of his warm sand-wallow. Looking up at the dark sky, he shook his long white fur clean of adhering sand, then he turned to enter his lair under the porch. His long chain dragged through the sand leaving behing a long furrow spotted with rain drops. Rain pattered loudly on the roof above us. Then, after a second thunder clap, the rain fell in buckets.
“Ahh, just what we needed, a good two inch rain storm to to refill our cistern,” said grandpa happily, walking over to the corner of the kitchen behind the wood stove.
“See up there?” he asked, pointing a dusty cob-webby corner behind the stove pipe.
I looked to where he pointed. Near the corner, partly hidden by the stove pipe, I could see a small, hand- carved wooden handle. The European-style letter “A” was inscribed on the wall on one side of the handle and on the other, was the letter “C”, where the point of the handle then rested.
“See, Robbie,” he said, "A" is for “aperto” and "C" for “chiuso”.
Just then, grandmother, called out from the sitting room, “Ottavio, e piove, ricorda! Faccia la cisterna!” as if to remind poppy of what he should do.
But Grandpa just waited. He turned to look out through the kitchen door, past the porch screens where it now appeared dark as dusk, and the rain continued to pelt down on the roof and pour over the full gutters in sheets.
Another call came from the sitting room. "Ottavio!"
“Aspetta” he answered, as he turned, and slowly slide a chair along the floor into the corner. He stood next to the chair, his head cocked, listening to the rain patter down on the roof, and gurgle along the gutters.
“Grandpa, why are you waiting so long, arent we wasting a lot of good rain water” I asked.
“We must wait, Robbie, 'Patzienza'. He added, with a patient smile, "We must first we let the hard rain wash over the roof and clean the gutters, only then can we open the valve to permit the clean water into the cistern.”
“Oh, I see!,” said I, as a vision of the summer roof with its burden of fallen leaves, moss, twigs, and probable bird droppings up there.
Finally, when grandpa thought the roof and gutters were clean, he stood on the chair and turned to handle to "A". I could hear the water gush into the cistern pipe.
"Come here Robbie," called grandpa, as he walked over to the sink. "Ascoltai a qua," he said, putting his hand on the handle of the cistern hand pump.
I leaned over the sink basin. From the primer-well at the top of hand-pump emanated the faint gurgling and splashing sound of rain water pouring down into the half-empty cistern.
Grandpa looked contnet. The cistern was filling, the vegetable garden and the orchard were being watered and all was well in his world.
And that’s how life went along in a time when only wood and a few gallons of kerosene supplied all our energy.
I am not suggesting here that we all go back to a 19th century life of burning wood and using one barrel of oil a year... but there remains much to learn from a review of that time, and the striking effectiveness, ingenuity and efficiency of our forefathers---who had to make do on much less, and found inventive ways to accomplish their goals. We must find a means to emulate their ingenuity and new ways to deal with our own--different--situation in a similar effective way.
We can do it!
Get the picture?`
