He imagined the heavy auger turning.
The wood shavings gathering.
The slow progress of the boring head through the center of the timber.
One section completed.
Then another.
Then another.
Until enough logs had been prepared to carry water from the hillside spring to the barn.
The tool in Glenn's hands had almost certainly been used for that work.
It had remained on the farm for generations.
It had survived changes in ownership, equipment, and farming methods.
It had hung on the barn wall long after the people who understood its purpose were gone.
And nobody had thought to ask why it was there.
Glenn stood.
He carried the auger back into the barn.
Then he hung it on the south wall, exactly where it had been for as long as he could remember.
But he no longer saw it as an old, forgotten tool.
He saw it as a connection to the man who had built the water system.
The man whose work had survived beneath the ground for more than a century.
The American chestnut trees from which Ezra had cut those logs had once dominated the forests of the eastern United States.
They had supplied food, timber, and materials for countless Appalachian farms.
Their nuts fed wildlife and livestock.
Their wood became fences, barns, beams, and water conduits.
Their bark was used in tanning.
For generations, the trees had been part of the region's daily life.
Then chestnut blight arrived in North America during the early twentieth century.
The fungal disease spread through the eastern forests, devastating the great trees that had shaped the landscape for centuries.
By the 1920s and 1930s, the disease was moving through the southern Appalachians.
By approximately 1940, the mature standing American chestnuts of Watauga County had been lost.
The forests changed.
A tree that had once been everywhere became almost impossible to find in its former mature form.
But the logs beneath the Trivet farm remained.
They had been cut in 1887.
Bored by hand.
Connected with iron sleeves.
And buried in a trench where cold spring water kept them wet.
While the great chestnut trees disappeared from the mountains above, the timber beneath the pasture continued serving its original purpose.
Even after the electric pump was installed in 1951, the buried logs remained protected by the soil.
The family forgot the system.
The access caps disappeared beneath grass.
The people who remembered its construction passed away.
But the wood endured.
For decades, the water line existed beneath the farm without anyone understanding what it was.
The spring continued flowing.
The hillside remained.
The barn stood below.