We have owned, used, cursed, drained, and abandoned six reservoirs in twenty years. Not tanks we sold — tanks we ran ourselves, in the back, because a shop that sells this gear and does not run any of it is just a catalog with opinions. Here they are, in order. Most of them are gone. One of them is the reason we are careful now.
TANKS ONE THROUGH THREE.
The first was a gray 55 we got for free because it had held something we were assured was “basically fine.” It was not basically fine. We learned to never accept a free tank without asking what it remembers, because water remembers. Tank two was a proper hundred, blue, boring, excellent — the only one that never did anything worth writing down, which is the highest compliment a reservoir can earn. Tank three cracked along a seam in year four during the one week nobody checked it, on a Sunday, of course, onto a floor that was not sealed, of course.
“WATER REMEMBERS THE SHAPE OF WHATEVER HELD IT LAST.”
Tank three is why we seal floors. Every lesson in this shop has a date and a puddle attached to it. We do not write the lessons down. We write down where the water went.
THE ONE THAT DIDN’T MAKE IT.
The fourth reservoir was in Talent, in September 2020. It is not there anymore. Neither is the building. We do not have a picture of it, because we did not stop to take one, because there were better uses of those minutes. We rebuilt in Medford for two years, then the building got sold out from under that one too, and then we came up the valley to Ruch.
We are telling you this the way we tell ourselves: briefly, and then we move to the next paragraph. The shop is still here. That is the entire moral and we are not going to decorate it.
THE RELUCTANT PUMP.
Tank five was unremarkable except for the pump, and the pump is the reason this is a story. It is a small submersible we have never been able to kill. It is not the mixer pump — that one ate itself in 2017 and we let it. This is the other one. It has moved with us through every reservoir since tank three, it has run dry twice, it has been frozen once, and it starts every single time with a noise like it is deeply put out to be asked. We do not trust things that work without complaining. The reluctant pump complains and works. That is the correct ratio.
Tank six is the one in Ruch now. It is plastic, it is boring, the floor under it is sealed, and the reluctant pump is in it, still reluctant. We check it on a schedule we actually keep, which is the one durable thing twenty years of puddles will teach you.
If you run your own reservoir: get the dull tank, seal the floor before you need to, and keep the pump that annoys you. The cheerful ones are the ones that quit.
The pump is still reluctant. So are we.
— The shop, Ruch, December 2025