They were perfect. Fifty-five-gallon, brick-red, heavy plastic, with large, black, screw-on lids. Best of all they were cheap. Twenty-five bucks a piece at the Co-op in Murfreesboro. I had been looking for something to make rain barrels out of for a while. If you buy them premade, they run just under a hundred dollars, and you got to catch a lot of rain-water to cover that cost. I had already priced spigots and other hardware, and that was about eight bucks per. Great! I thought, I can make rain barrels for about a third of the retail price. I bought four.
They had originally been used for shipping olives, and they would be perfect for catching rainwater. All I had to do was figure out how to get the rain in and how to get the water out in a controlled fashion.
Getting the rain in would be easy. The lids came in two pieces—there was a flat piece that lay across the opening and a ring that screwed down over it. Think of a giant canning lid. Screw-on lids meant I could occasionally open them for cleaning. All I had to do was drill half-a-dozen holes about an inch in diameter in each lid. Then, to keep the mosquitos out, I put a piece of screen over the lids and secured it with the ring. Very clever, I thought.
Getting the water out would be a little more challenging. To do that, I had to drill a hole near the bottom of the barrel and install a spigot. Drilling the hole and inserting a spigot was easy. Securing the spigot wasn’t. In order to do that, I’d have to crawl inside the barrel and screw a brass nut over the shaft of the spigot. I’d also have to make sure that the nut was tight and the joint properly sealed with a little grommet that I’d made out of small sheet of rubber fabric. It wasn’t a complex process—like brain surgery or assembling a bicycle—but it was all taking place inside a barrel, with limited space and, as I would discover later, a residual coating of olive oil.
I was a little nervous about getting in the first barrel because the opening was just about the same width as my shoulders. But I figured that I could lay the barrel on its side in the garage, get down on my knees, lift both arms above my head (holding the wrench, nut, and grommet) and shimmy into the barrel. If I can get in, I thought, surely, I can get out. So, I held my breath and crawled in. That was my first mistake. (Actually, it wasn’t, as I would discover a few minutes later, my first mistake was being alone.)
I got in easily enough, and even though it was hard to move around inside the barrel, I was able to get the grommet and brass nut on the spigot and tighten them down with the wrench. One problem I hadn’t foreseen, however, was that I was still wearing my hearing aids, and they got into some sort of feedback loop and started fussing at me.
Eeeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeee! they screamed.
Also, I was getting good and oiled up. It was summer, and I was wearing a T-shirt, so the residual olive oil coated my arms and hands and face and ears and the top of my head. And my glasses. The barrel and I were still lying on the garage floor at this point. It was hot, and I was starting to sweat, and my hearing aids sounded like angry hornets, but I had that damn spigot installed and secured. I was happy… Then I tried to get out.
There were two problems I wasn’t prepared for: first, there was a sharp lip around the bottom of the hole in the barrel—one I didn’t notice when the barrel was upright. When I was trying to get out, however, I kept catching my shoulder blades against it. Second, in order to install and secure the rubber grommet and the brass nut, (as well as to fit in the barrel), I had to put my hands above my head. Now, I couldn’t get my arms low enough to grab the bottom of the barrel. There was no way for me to push out of it. I was stuck.
And I was alone. It was early-afternoon, it would be several hours before Vanessa got home, the sun was heating up, turning the garage into a blast furnace. The temperature was already in the mid-eighties, outside the barrel. Inside the barrel, it was like a Greek sauna.
I wriggled this way; I wriggled that way. My glasses were foggy and oily. By now, I was sweating profusely, and the salt from the sweat was burning the places where I had scraped my shoulder blades on the sharp lip of the barrel, I was starting to panic, and my hearing aids were on a rampage: Eeeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeee!
I told myself to stay calm. I am an educated man, I thought, a college professor, for god’s sake! At the time, I was also chair of a large academic department, and I had served seven years as dean of an even larger academic division. I should have been able to think my way out of that barrel.
But for the life of me, I couldn’t.
I managed to crawl up on my knees, still in the garage, the barrel bobbing around like a deep-sea buoy in a perfect storm. Don’t panic, I told myself. Don’t panic.
Eeeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeee! my hearing aids squealed.
I thought about our most recent college initiative. This was several years ago, and we were trying to teach students critical thinking through various types of problem solving.
Step One, Define the Problem: I’M STUCK IN A BARREL! I’M GONNA DIE!
Eeeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeee!
I fell back onto the floor, and there was another minute or two of writhing. Eventually, though, through sheer force of will, I got back up on my knees, took a deep breath, and moved on to…
Step Two, Review the Options and Select the Best Solution: I was not going settle for Option One because, well, dying in an olive barrel in the garage seemed so untidy. Option Two: Get myself out of the barrel. Impossible. Option Three: Get help. It was the only one that seemed feasible, as humiliating as it would be.
Through sheer force of luck, the battery in my left hearing aid died, and I started getting warnings in my right: Beep, beep. Low battery. Beep, beep. Low battery. Beep, beep.
Step Three, Implement the Plan: Earlier that day my neighbor, Phillip, had been working outside, and I thought maybe he was still out there. I called his name across the hedge, trying so sound casual. “Phillip!… Oh, Phillip…! Are you there?” I was wondering if I could somehow give him the impression that this was all part of a plan, but he didn’t answer. “Phillip!… Oh, Phillip…!”
Which meant that I had to leave the garage. I had been in the barrel for about fifteen minutes at this point, and I was afraid that it would be permanent somehow. That I’d transmogrify into some sort of a strange, hybrid snail-man creature.
So, I forced myself to stand up, and when I did, the bottom of the barrel, which was over my head, bumped into the exposed rafters of the garage. There was another round of bobbing—this time accompanied by bumping and banging, cursing and yowling—as I worked my way out of the garage. And into the direct sunlight.
I couldn’t see a thing. My glasses were coated with sweat and olive oil, and besides, my forward vision was limited to the barrel wall.
I had one idea left. There was a friendly young couple living across the street. They had one young child and another on the way. At the time, I thought she was a stay-at-home mom, and I hoped that she’d be there. I couldn’t remember if I had seen her SUV in the driveway that afternoon or not, but I had to try. At the very least, I thought, surely someone will drive down the street, see a snail-man bobbing around the neighborhood, and stop, if for no other reason than the spectacle. Of course, someone driving down the street might have just run me over. But that would be okay, I thought.
In was about fifty yards from my garage to my neighbor’s front yard. As I made my way down the drive, my shoulders cramped from holding the barrel above my head, which I had to do because every time I lowered it, the bottom ring restricted my leg movement. So, I slowly waddled down the driveway, focusing all my attention on the only sliver of the external world that I could still see: my feet and a small crescent of asphalt.
Turns out, both wife and husband were home that afternoon, trying to take a nap, when they heard someone yelling, “Help! Help! Help!” outside. I couldn’t see their expressions when they looked out from their second-story window and saw a man careening around the front yard in a barrel, but the look I saw a couple minutes later, after the extrication, was benign bemusement. I got to know them a little after that incident. Good people.
Step Four, Evaluate the Outcome: We stood in their front yard for a moment, awkwardly. Once you’ve pulled someone out of a barrel, small talk seems pointless, so I wiped the sweat and olive oil out of my burning eyes, flexed my aching shoulders and stretched, gathered up my barrel, and carried it back to the garage, where the other three were waiting.
Might want to rethink the process, I thought.
