A wise person once advised me that there was nothing more boring than water and I should never write about it. So here goes...

I would argue that other than massive infusions of cash, water is the thing you need the most. Fences can be built or rebuilt and feed you can grow or buy elsewhere but without a reliable source of water you’re ranching dreams will shrivel up and die. Literally. (I guess you could forget about the fences and just let your cows eat your neighbor’s grass but as the professors and bureaucrats say, this is just not sustainable.)

It’s no fun checking water only to find 100 angry cows standing up to their knees in mud without a drop of water in the trough because some hunter blasted away at your water trough just because you put up some “No Trespassing” signs.

Cowboys won’t admit this but there’s more to cowboying than bustin’ broncs. Quite often they must step off their high horse to perform some very uncowboy-like things such as driving a baler, cuttin’ stove wood, milking a cow, servicing a tractor and wearin’ flat shoes. The one task a cowboy will NEVER admit doing is plumbing, which they often have to do. I know I’ve done my share. On big ranches they have men who do nothing but plumbing, working on windmills, digging ditches and laying pipe. Such cowboy plumbers are shunned by real cowboys and aren’t even invited to join in bunkhouse poker games. If they’re even allowed in the bunkhouse at all.

We rented one place that was practically devoid of water and it really tested my plumbing skills. I was forever having to build and clean spring boxes, and I laid a lot of PVC. In the end we were left with one reliable spring that produced what I’d call “chunky style” water. It wasn’t even wet and the cows chewed it, but only as a last resort.

Interestingly, long after we’d vacated the place for lack of water, the ranch became awash in the stuff. The town put a sewer plant on the south end of the ranch and every citizen in the community sent their water there. And I do mean ALL of it.

Cowboys are so ashamed about their occasional plumbing that they dare not be seen in the plumbing section at the hardware store. (I hate to admit this, but I rather enjoy plumbing.) I spent three summers working in the oilfields and one of them was in a compressor plant which was plumbing on steroids. I learned a lot, like the difference between a Stillson wrench and a pipe wrench and “righty tighty, lefty Lucy.” I liked it all so much I probably should have been a plumber making $250 an hour instead of a columnist making $25.

There’s hardly a time I go to the hardware store that I don’t drift over into the plumbing section to see what’s new. I was shocked out of my shorts recently to see the price for copper fittings. One bin for a copper reducer said they were $39 bucks. For a two-inch piece of copper and that was if they had it, which they didn’t. Several bins were empty because of a supply problem. The prices were so high it was tempting to make me cash in on my world class collection of unions, nipples and tees that I’ve collected over the past 50 years. Who’d ever guess that plumbing parts would provide a better return on investment than jojoba beans, silver coins or certificates of deposit?

I try to be real sneaky about checking out the plumbing section but I was recently spotted by a cowboy acquaintance in the plumbing aisle with my basket filled with four-inch plastic elbows and the biggest float valves they had. “What you doin’ Pittsy,” he chuckled, “don’t tell me you’ve fallen so low that you’re doing your own plumbing on the ranch?”

“Oh, no,” I lied, to avoid his contempt, “I’m just fixing the toilet at our house.”

“That must be some high-powered toilet if it requires a ball valve the size of a basketball and four-inch pipe,” he said. “You know, if someone in your family has a problem I could recommend an excellent gastroenterologist.”