Her father sighed.
“Tomorrow.”
They climbed the ridge before breakfast.
The old cattle reservoir lay behind cottonwoods and tall weeds.
At first it looked empty.
Then the Farm Girl ran ahead.
“Dad.”
Her father came closer.
Water.
Not much compared with the reservoir’s original capacity.
But more than he expected.
The upper section had been fed by a buried spring line decades earlier.
Apparently, somewhere beneath the hill, water still seeped.
The reservoir might hold fifteen thousand gallons.
Maybe twenty.
Not enough to irrigate sixty-eight acres properly.
But not nothing.
The Farm Girl crouched beside the outlet.
It had been capped.
A buried pipe ran south.
“Where does that go?”
Her father stared.
“I don’t know.”
“Grandpa built it?”
“Probably.”
“Where?”
“I said I don’t know.”
She looked at the ground.
Then at the slope.
“Could it go toward the lower field?”
The Farmer Father shook his head.
“That system predates the soybean field.”
“Where did cattle drink?”
“North lots.”
“Could we connect new pipe?”
“With what pressure?”
“Gravity.”
Her father looked at her.
She had learned the word from an old farm magazine.
He knew.
“Gravity isn’t magic.”
“I know.”
“You need enough elevation.”
“How much do we have?”
He looked downhill.
That was a better question.
They spent the morning with a carpenter’s level, string, fence posts, and far more patience than either expected.
The reservoir sat approximately twenty-eight feet above the lowest section of soybean ground.
Maybe thirty.
Enough for flow.
Perhaps.
The issue was distance.
Nearly nine hundred feet from the reservoir outlet to the first rows.
They did not have nine hundred feet of usable pipe.
The girl returned to the scrap pile.
Counted again.
Measured.
Added.
They were short by almost three hundred feet.
Her father expected disappointment.
Instead she asked, “Do we have old pipe anywhere?”
He laughed.
“This whole farm is old pipe.”
They searched.
Behind the barn.
Under the machine shed.
Along an abandoned hog lot.
They found ninety feet.
Then sixty.
Some buried.
Some rusted.
Some with threads that no longer matched anything.
The Farm Girl laid all the pieces across the yard.
Her mother came out carrying lemonade.
“I assume this is a project.”
“It’s irrigation.”
Her mother looked toward her husband.
He shrugged.
“She has a plan.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
The Farm Girl ignored both.
She needed joints.
The Dalton scrap pile had mismatched fittings.
Some pipes were threaded.
Others used compression couplings.
A few were different diameters entirely.
She spent two days trying combinations.
One evening, the Farmer Father found her crying behind the shed.
Not loudly.
Just sitting on an overturned bucket holding a coupling.
He sat beside her.
Neither spoke immediately.
Finally he said, “What happened?”