If Laura Ingalls Wilder Can Write About Pump Handles Then I Can Too

I woke up early to finish a magazine piece and checked the temperature outside, which was 17 F. I don't care where you live, that's pretty cold. So I got to thinking about pump handles. Several generations ago it was an American boy wintertime thing to dare other, more gullible boys to lick the handle of the iron water pumps that were commonly found on farms and such. No less a literary personage than Laura Ingalls Wilder mentions this in her book Farmer Boy.

Now, for goodness' sake, I hope you haven't run out to try it and see what happens, because your tongue freezes to the handle. Unless someone brings hot water, or you wait until spring arrives, you won't leave the spot without also leaving behind a goodish chunk of your tongue. This differs from the tortures of the Inquisition in being worse because you've done it to yourself.

I know it seems cruel, and is cruel, but it's really just nature teaching you to be wiser in the future. It also helps the social group get a sense of each other, don't you think? If you know that someone has licked a pump handle in the winter after being told to, you have a useful piece of information if, say, in later life you are wondering if you should give that person power of attorney or whatever.

If all the victims of pump-handle lickings could speak to us today, they would probably express the hope that other people learn from their heartache so that what happened to them never happens to anyone else. I think things are improving along these lines—the gradual disappearance of iron water pumps probably has a lot to do with that—but I also think we can draw some conclusions from this that can help us in other life situations. Here they are:

1) The fact that a person is daring you to do a thing is a strong hint that you should not do that thing.

2) Another hint is if you cannot imagine a single reason that any good would come of the thing you're being dared to do.

3) Yet another hint is if you can, however, imagine that the person doing the daring would laugh uproariously if the thing being dared turned out to discomfit you in some way.

We can now term this new understanding the Pump Handle Principle. As a gulllible person myself who learned, as life went on, to be a little more judiciously suspicious, I can only hope it does some good out there. There are fewer pump handles about, maybe, but my guess is that society still has the same ratio of cruel to gullible people that it always did.