The Wheel at Hollow Creek

Part One · Two Plans

Every morning at Grandma's, the first job was water. The tomato bed sat on a dry flat shelf above the creek, and the creek was the only water for half a mile. So Cal carried it, two buckets at a time, up the bank and along the path. On a hot day that meant twenty trips before breakfast. By the second week of August his hands had blisters and his arms felt like rope. He was ten years old, and he was fairly certain there had to be a better way.

The better way was hanging on a nail in the barn. It was an old bicycle wheel, slightly bent, with no tire, and Cal had been studying it for a week. In a library book he had seen a picture of a water wheel with cups around the edge. It turned in a river and lifted water up to a field. The river did all the work, and nobody carried anything. He took the wheel down, blew the dust off it, and went to find his cousin.

Nora was twelve and had plans of her own. She was standing in the creek with her jeans rolled up, frowning at the water, which barely covered her ankles. Hollow Creek was wide and clear and cold, and it was never, anywhere, deep enough to swim in properly. Nora wanted a swimming hole. She had already chosen the location, a bend below the enormous sycamore, and she had been stacking rocks across the creek there since breakfast. Cal looked at her dam, and Nora looked at his wheel. Neither of them was particularly impressed.

The wheel took most of the day. Cal wired eight tin cans around the rim. When the wheel turned, every can would scoop up water at the bottom and pour it out at the top. He cut two forked branches from a willow and pushed them into the creek bed for the axle to rest on. For a trough he used a length of old rain gutter from behind the barn. Grandpa watched from the porch with his coffee and offered no advice at all, which Cal understood was a kind of respect.

By evening it was finished, and it worked, which was the amazing part. The wheel sat in the fastest place Cal could find, where the creek narrowed between two stones, and it turned. Slowly, with a creak at every can, but it turned. Each can came up full, tipped over at the top, and poured its water into the gutter. The gutter carried it along the bank to the tomato bed. It was only a trickle, and it would probably take all night to water the tomatoes. But Cal had not carried a single bucket.

Nora's dam was done by evening too. She had built it the way Grandpa built stone walls, big rocks at the bottom, smaller ones on top, and the spaces packed tight with gravel and mud. Behind it the creek had stopped looking like a creek. It had spread out into a wide, still, brown pool, up to Nora's waist already and rising. She floated on her back in the middle of it with her eyes shut, looking happier than Cal had seen her all summer. The dam was about thirty steps downstream from his wheel.

Cal did not think about that at all until the following morning. He came down the path with his toast still in his hand, and stopped completely. The pool had risen overnight. It had crept up the creek, stone by stone, until it reached the place where the creek narrowed, and then it had quietly swallowed the narrow place. His wheel stood up to its axle in still brown water, and the cans hung there, full and going nowhere. The gutter was dry, and nothing, anywhere, was moving.

The argument that followed was short and loud. Cal said the dam had to come down immediately, and Nora said the wheel could move somewhere else. Cal said there was nowhere else fast enough, and she knew it. Nora said she had been here first, which was not even true. Grandpa came down to discover what the shouting was about, looked at the pool, looked at the wheel, and looked at the two of them. One creek, he said, and two cousins. Then he went back up to pick beans, and left them standing in the water.

Part Two · The Gap

Cal spent the afternoon carrying buckets again, and being angry, which is surprisingly tiring work. Nora spent it floating in her pool. That night he lay awake listening to the creek through the window and made a plan he was not especially proud of. He would get up before anyone else. He would go down to the dam and pull out the biggest rocks at the bottom. The whole thing would wash away, and he could say the creek had done it by itself. He set his alarm for five and did not sleep much.

The creek at five in the morning was a completely different creek. Mist lay on the pool like a sheet, and the water was so cold that his feet ached immediately. Cal waded in from the downstream side and put both hands on the biggest rock at the bottom of the dam. Then he stopped, because of the sound. It was a sound he had not noticed the day before, when they were busy shouting: a steady rushing roar, like a tap turned all the way on. It was coming from the middle of the dam.

Nora had left a gap. Right in the middle of the dam, between two flat rocks, there was an opening the width of his two hands, and the entire creek was pouring through it. All the water that used to spread wide and shallow across the stones was squeezed into that single gap. It came through white and hard and fast, faster than Cal had ever seen water move in Hollow Creek. He put his hand into it, and the creek shoved it aside as if it were nothing. He forgot completely about the big rock.

He stood in the cold water with the mist around his knees and thought it through, slowly and carefully, the way Grandpa did things. The dam had not stopped the creek. It had only gathered it up, held it, and released it through one small door. All the power of the whole wide creek was going through that door. His wheel did not actually need a lot of water; it needed fast water. And the fastest water in the valley was now right here, in the middle of his cousin's dam.

Moving the wheel took him until breakfast. He pulled the forked sticks out of the mud and pushed them in again directly below the gap, one on each side. Now the bottom of the wheel hung right in the white water. The gutter had to be longer now, and he found another section behind the barn and wired the two together. By the time Nora came down the path, yawning, in her swimsuit, the wheel was already in position. She stopped and stared at it. Then she stared at him.

The wheel was not turning slowly anymore; it was spinning. The white water hit the cans at the bottom and flung them up and around, and each can came over the top so quickly that the water flew out in a bright arc and smacked into the gutter. The gutter was running full, a genuine stream, racing along the bank. Nora did not say anything for a while, and then she asked whether he had taken any of her rocks. Not one, Cal said. I was going to, and then I heard it.

They walked up to the tomato bed together, following the gutter. The water was already there, ahead of them, spilling out of the end and running down the rows in a dozen little dark streams. The dust went dark wherever it touched. The tomato leaves, which had been hanging limp all week, were going to have a very good day. Nora picked the first ripe tomato and bit into it like an apple. Then she went back down to her pool, and Cal sat on the bank and listened to his wheel tick.