If you live the gardener’s existence you’ll come to know a force of evil that pesticides can’t kill, an enemy that simply cannot be defeated. To get to the water, to experience the blossoms or the fruit, to get to truly know Mother Nature or commune with the leafy botanical miracles described in the Farmers’ Almanac you’ll have to run the tangled gauntlet that haunts the souls and green thumbs of every poor sap with dirt under his nails or a red burn on the back of his neck.

I speak of the world’s original hose job.

The first garden hose was manufactured in hell by the Lucifer Rubber & Frustration Co. It is typically sold in a green, oversized version of a Slinky that makes it a reasonable object to carry but an impossible object to get water out of.

It will be difficult to get it attached to the hose bib with enough proficiency to prevent water from escaping from the union of the hose coupling and the faucet. Lucifer designed this coupling with a left-hand thread so no matter how many times you connect a hose to its water source you will spend twelve minutes turning the coupling in the wrong direction. No Right-Tighty/Lefty-Loosey orientation here because, well, like I said, it’s a hose job.

Anyway, say you hit lotto and manage to successfully marry hose and faucet, now the fun begins in earnest. Because it’s a giant Slinky when you grab a new hose by the end and move, say, three feet, it will automatically kink. The Devil designed it that way. The arcs in the coil mean that it will, at about thirty-six-inch intervals, collapse upon itself when the hose is pulled.

This kink will cut-off all water flow to the end of the hose you’re holding and then create an impressive amount of pressure at the end where the hose is plugged into the hose bib. And as we’ve detailed, since it’s unlikely that you were able to make a “pure” connection at that junction, that high pressure will create a powerful spray pattern from the wrong end of the hose which will, depending on where the hose bib is in your yard, shower three-to-seven of the windows in your house with a pelting torrent. Should those windows be open, you will be berated as you clean up the mess – dumbass!

So you figure that the only way to break-in a new hose is to straighten the entire length out. Unravel it completely. This will surely undo the genetic kinking that Lucifer installed at the factory. You turn off the water and start winding the hose out. You walk with it down the driveway and now across the street and, because you bought the 100-foot, commercial-grade, $175 hose, you’re now standing halfway up the embankment of your neighbor’s house … and that’s a problem.

There are lots of reasons why you can’t stand your neighbor, but the biggest reason is that he never waters his yard at all. Nope, five years ago he bought into the drought bullshit hook-line-and-sinker, turned his entire yard into what looks like a median strip in Tuscon, Arizona (talk about a hose job). Now he reports you and the rest of your neighbors if you water on the wrong days, and you want to fire-off a watery stream into his yard but, well, you need to work the kinks out first.

I have eight different nozzles I can attach to the end of the hose. They let me spray the water in eighteen amusing patterns that include “full,” “jet,” “shower,” “cone,” “vertical” and “mist.”

Of course, you have to screw it on “just right” to get it to work properly, and like the connection crisis that happens at the hose bib, installing the nozzle to the hose usually results in a leaking, angry spray of water. It must not be on there tight enough, so I get out a pair of plyers or maybe a pipe wrench. I screw the fuckin’ nozzle on the hose as tight as my little chicken wing can turn it.

Now I have a leak-less nozzle but I can’t get the nozzle off so for non-nozzle watering I had to buy a second hose.

♦

Well, I’ve come to accept that watering is a process that takes about ninety minutes. The flowers will be wet, the dog will be wet, my shoes and socks and the kitchen windows will be wet.

The hose will kink about once per plant. And all of the kinks will happen about twenty feet from where you’re watering so that you’ll have to put the hose down and walk over and unkink it. When you put the hose down it will flood part of the yard and create mud somewhere … and you’ll get yelled at for that.

After ninety minutes of watering I spend the next ninety minutes trying to wind-up the hose … at least I get to be outside.

Photo credit: Internet Archive Book Images on Best Running / No known copyright restrictions