When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #11

Story #11 - My ride down the water tough – it almost killed me!

We would go up to Cloudcroft in the mountains and not too far off the highway was a public waterspout. It was mountain water that was runoff and they had a small 3x3-foot rock pillar about 4 feet tall with a pipe spout half way down the front side where you could collect the water. It went down onto a trough and behind the pillar back down the mountainside. I guess you could say it was like a natural spring. The water was ‘soft’ as they would say and tasted wonderful and it was always mountain cool! It felt good on hot summer days to go up there and then feel the cool water. The water we had at home and in the town was mineral tasting and hard. My dad used to tease and say, ‘Watch out if you throw that water at someone, it will knock you down!’ In other words it was ‘hard water’ and tasted a little bitter. As a kid, personally I thought it tasted great! Nobody in our household thought so! My mother had about eight 5-gallon water jugs and about a dozen one-gallon jugs. We would fill them up and haul them all home. We had a water cooler in our kitchen that my dad and sometimes my brothers would lift the 5-gallon water jugs onto.

When we were up in the mountains filling the jugs my mother would warn us, especially my twin brother and I, NOT to climb into the trough behind the pillar. It was dangerous and it was not to be touched! I was about 5 or 6 years old and well, one day my curiosity got the best of me and I just HAD to go for a ride down that trough. I barely got on it and hadn’t gone 3 feet when I was ‘snatched’ up off of there and scolded for doing so! Then I was shown what would have happened to me had I not been snatched up. It scared my parents to death! I can’t remember who snatched me, whether it was my mom or my dad. I kind of think it was my dad. Having two little twins made their work twice as hard! We could think of a lot to get into, and that would be trouble. Well they showed me where the trough went and then I was scared! You see the trough was only a few feet long and went over the side. What you couldn’t see was that there was barbed wire stretched across the trough as it got very steep and went over the side and fell far below onto rocks. There was about a foot gap under the stretched barbed wire. Perhaps a person could slip through, but hopefully the barbed wire would save them first. That was a long way down! I never went near that trough again. In fact, it scared me so badly that I was afraid if I went behind the pillar I might slip onto the trough and get massacred by the barbed wire. From then on I always stayed in front where the water came out!