The man has talked at me across a fence line for thirty-four years — pumps, floats, frost depth — and in all of it there have been four sentences about himself. I can tell you the exact night I got them.
He had the wellhead open and the pitless adapter out on a feed sack and he was talking the whole time, which is how you know nothing is wrong yet.
“Now this is a Franklin motor and you’ll see them go thirty years, but somebody put a Chinese control box on it in oh-nine and they run hot, and the capacitor’s what quits, and then everybody wants to pull the pump.” He had a screwdriver in his teeth for part of that. “Nobody wants to check the cheap thing first. Cheap thing’s always first. It’s a two-dollar part and a four-hundred-dollar afternoon and I have to go up there and be sad about it with them.”
“Is it the capacitor?”
“No.” He set the box down. “It’s the check valve. But I’m going to show them the box so they feel like we looked.”
That is Hollis Purdy at a wellhead, and I have watched him do it on my own place and on forty other places since 1992, and it is the closest thing to a religious experience available in this county.
Here is what I said about him for thirty-four years, to my husband, to my son, to anybody at a branding who asked me what Hollis was like: half of him is always somewhere else.
I had a case. He will talk for two hours about a foot valve and has never once in my hearing said a sentence about his own life. Not about Arletta leaving in 2003. Not about his mother. He does not say goodbye — he is just gone, and you look up and his truck is not there. He came to my husband’s funeral in October of 2011, stood in the back for about twenty minutes, and left before the church emptied, and I saw the door go and I have thought about that door every year since.
His left hand does not close now. Two of the fingers are stiff and the ring finger is short at the end, and that happened at two in the morning on the fourth night of a February job on my place, on my well, on a call I made. He was sixty. He did not tell me it happened. I found out from his daughter eleven days later.
So that is the ledger I am working from, and I have to do this honestly, because I am also the person who made the story of him that this whole county repeats. I am good at telling it. I was the librarian here for twenty-two years and I know how a story travels and I built that one to travel.
The four letters got read out loud at us on the Owyhee road in September of 2016.
Four hours to camp, and my granddaughter Wren was fourteen and in the back seat with a phone, and she read a quiz out at us for about forty miles. Do you prefer to plan ahead or keep your options open. Hollis would not answer a single one straight.
“Plan ahead for what.”
“It doesn’t say for what, Papa Hollis, it’s just in general.”
“Well, there isn’t a general. There’s a Tuesday and there’s a hay truck.”
She scored him anyway and read out his four letters and read the description off the phone, and there was a line in there about being good with tools, and I laughed until I had to slow down. Hollis said, “So it’s a horoscope for men who own a grinder,” and Wren said that was the meanest thing he’d ever said, and it was, and we drove on.
I did not look those letters up until March of 2025. Eight and a half years. I want to be plain about why. I had a very good story about Hollis Purdy, and a good story is a load-bearing wall, and you do not go poking at a load-bearing wall in a house you are still living in.
ISTP Behavior: What He Does With a Whole Day
The shop is forty by sixty with a dirt apron in front of it and an oil stove in the corner, and there is no chair in it. Thirty-four years and he has never put a chair in that building. You stand in the doorway or you stand at the bench, and if you are there more than about six minutes you start looking for something to hold.
What is in there: a lathe he traded a pump job for in 1998, a wall of drop pipe, three motorcycles in various states, a parts washer, an ultrasonic cleaner he is very proud of, and an outboard motor I will get to. What is not in there: a photograph, a calendar with anything written on it, a chair.
There are three motorcycles in there because he still rides. He is sixty-one and last October he took a KTM up the Leslie Gulch road behind two men in their thirties and was waiting at the top, and when he came down he did not say one word about the ride and talked for a half hour about a fork seal.
Give that man a Saturday with nothing on it and here is what happens. He goes out to the shop at seven. At nine he is into something that was not on his mind at seven, because he moved a bucket and found it. At two he has three things apart on the bench and has driven to Vale for one fitting. At six he is still out there and the thing he started at seven has not been touched. He is not lost and he is not avoiding anything. He is being carried along by the objects, one to the next, at a rate that looks aimless from the yard and is not aimless at all from the bench.
We hunted chukar with a shorthair named Ike from 2006 to 2019. Ike would find birds all day long and would not retrieve — not once, not ever, no matter what anybody did — so you had to walk to every single bird, which in that country means a lot of sidehill and shale for a bird you already shot. Everyone told us to get another dog. We had that dog thirteen years and Hollis walked to every bird that dog ever pointed and never complained about it, and when Ike went down in the truck bed in November of 2019 Hollis drove him to Ontario himself and did not tell me until the next week. None of that is about anything. It is in here because a third of the hours of my life since 2006 were spent on a sidehill behind a dog who would not bring anything back.
ISTP Traits: The Only Thing He Ever Told Me About Himself
In thirty-four years I have gotten exactly one autobiographical sentence out of Hollis Purdy, and I had to be there for it.
It was 2014 and we were on a ridge above Succor Creek waiting on light, and I asked him where he learned wells, and he said, “Fella named Deitz, in Nyssa,” and then he told me about a rig for twenty minutes. That is it. That is the corpus.
But he will tell you everything about a pump. He will tell you what a torque arrestor is for and why the fellow in Homedale sets them wrong, and what happens to a submersible when the water drops down to it and it starts pulling air — which is a sound he can imitate, and which he made me listen to across a kitchen table for ten minutes at the Ivers place while their daughter was in the next room having the worst week of her life.
Talking is not the thing he does not do. He talks more than I do and I ran a library. At Britt’s wedding in 2019 he stood at the edge of the tent for two hours and explained the tent to four different people. Poles, ratchets, how they stake it in that ground. Four people, same tent.
So my case was strong, and here is how it went at the funeral.
Guy died on a Wednesday in October of 2011 and we buried him Saturday out of the church in Adrian, and there were maybe two hundred people. Hollis came in late and stood in the back on the left. I could see him from where I was because I could not look at the front. He was there for the first hymn and the first reading. And then the door went, and there was that white square of light on the wall for a second, and he was gone, and he was not at the hall afterward.
Thirteen years I told that. I told it well. I would say the part about the square of light.
ISTP vs INTP: Two Men Who Won’t Guess
Chalk Basin has about a dozen domestic wells in it and starting around 2019 they all went down together, a foot and a half a year, which does not sound like anything until you have three families hauling water in August.
Two men in this county worked that problem and neither one of them would say a word until he was sure.
Neale Ibach is fifty-three and he is the hydrogeologist out of the state field office and I like him a great deal. He put five years into Chalk Basin. He had a working explanation in 2020 and he took it apart himself in 2021 because of a static level that did not fit, and then he had a second one, and then in 2022 he raised a possibility about a fault that nobody had considered and that turned out not to be it, and he was delighted about that, delighted, in a way that made two ranchers want to throw him in the creek. In 2024 he put out a report that is the best thing anybody has ever written about water in this county. The district changed the pumping rules off it. It is why there is water in Chalk Basin in 2026.
Hollis was in Chalk Basin too, on the wells themselves, and what he did in five years is he kept eleven households in water. He would drop a pump, or set a smaller one, or come out at eleven at night and change a pressure switch and be gone by one. He said one thing about the aquifer in 2019, at the Ivers kitchen table, which was that the basin was going and somebody ought to look at it, and then he never said it again, to anybody, including Neale.
They are the same animal underneath and it took me a long while to see it. Both of them run a private worked-out system that they will not state out loud until it is finished, and neither one will take a conclusion off another man secondhand, and both of them are perfectly willing to let you be wrong all afternoon rather than say a thing they have not derived themselves.
Where they part is what the system opens onto. Hollis’s opens onto the object under his hands right now — the pipe, checked continuously against what the thing is actually doing, closing to one answer as fast as the situation will allow, because a calf does not drink a hypothesis. Neale’s opens outward into everything it could be, and it keeps opening, and at year three there is a fourth possibility, and at year five there is a report that will outlive both of them.
Put each of them in the other’s job and Chalk Basin comes up empty both ways. Put Neale on the Ivers wellhead and he is still taking measurements at sundown and those cows are dry, because his instrument opens options and that job needs one closed by dark. And put Hollis on the district docket and there is nothing at all: he will not write anything, he does not believe a rule moves water, and the thing that finally moved that board came out of the five years of turning it over that he will not spend.
Neale drives to Boise one Saturday a month for a chess league he has never won anything in. He told me the drive is the good part.
ISTP Strengths and Weaknesses: The Story I Told at the Fair Board
Fair board dinner, April of 2024, in the hall at Adrian, a hundred and ten people at long tables and the beef gone by seven.
They ask me to talk because I am the one who knows what happened in this county and because I am funny. I did a run about the school bond and then I got onto Hollis, which I always do, because everyone in that room has been saved by that man at some hour and everyone in that room has also had him walk out of their kitchen mid-sentence. It kills every time. I did the two hours on the foot valve. I did the not-saying-goodbye. And then I brought it home the way I always bring it home, which is Guy’s funeral, twenty minutes, the door, the square of light. Half of him is always somewhere else, and God help you if you need the half that isn’t.
The room went. It went the way a room goes when you have earned it.
Britt Purdy was at the next table with her back half to me. She is Hollis’s daughter, she runs a welding rig out of a flatbed and she is not a person who is shy about a room. She did not turn around and she did not laugh, and I saw that, and I went ahead and finished it and did the tag line and sat down and had my pie.
I am going to be precise here, because leaving this part out would make the whole page a brochure about me. I saw her not laugh, I understood in that second that I was doing something to a person, and I finished the bit anyway, because I was two lines from the end of it and it was working.
Now, the strength, said straight, because I owe it and because it is the same machinery.
Nobody in six hundred square miles can do what that man does.
The Ivers place, 2021. Their system was a variable-speed setup put in by an outfit out of Boise, and it was cycling — kicking on and off every ninety seconds — and two service trucks had already been out and one of them had sold them a pressure tank. Hollis stood in that pump house with his hands in his pockets for about a minute and a half. Then he asked Dean Ivers when they’d put the new hydrant in by the corral. Dean said August. Hollis said, “Who trenched it,” and Dean said his nephew, and Hollis went out and walked the line and came back and said there was a leak out there small enough that the system could not tell the difference between a leak and a house, so it was hunting. He was right. Four minutes, counting the walk.
He is running something in his head that has no name and no steps he can hand you, and it closes to one answer while you are still finding your hat. And it does not run on experience alone, because I have watched him do it on equipment that did not exist when he learned.
And the same equipment is why he could not stay in that church. He does not have an instrument for a room full of grieving people. He has one for a truck that will not start.
ISTP Under Stress: Four Days in February
The well went at four in the afternoon on the eleventh of February, 2025, at eight degrees, in the middle of calving, with a hundred and ninety head on that trough.
I called him at 4:20 and he was in the yard at 5:10 with the lights on the flatbed and he did not go home for four days.
You want to know what pulling a submersible is, in February, at night. It is three hundred and eighty feet of pipe coming out of the ground in twenty-foot sticks, one at a time, each stick full of water that comes out on your boots, and the boots freeze, and then the sticks freeze to each other, and the whole while the wind is coming down off the rim like it has a grudge.
The first night was diagnosis and it took until eleven, and I stood there holding a light while he ran the amp clamp and listened to things and said almost nothing, which from him is alarming. The second night he rigged a tarp off the flatbed with a salamander heater under it, and we got two hundred feet of pipe up before the wind took the tarp and we did it again. He fed the cows off the creek with a chainsaw and a sledge both mornings because there was no other water, and that is an hour a day that is not the job and he never mentioned it as work.
The pump came up sand-locked. The drop pipe had a split in it that he found by feel, in the dark, with his glove off, and I want to say he found it in about eleven seconds. He put a new one in from the trailer because he carries a new one. By the third day I was worthless and just carrying things. And somewhere in there — the third night, after midnight, with both of us at the tailgate and neither of us saying anything — I said it to him.
I said, “You know, half of you is always somewhere else.”
He had a pipe wrench in his hand and he looked at me the way he looks at a thing he has been asked about.
“Where?”
“What do you mean where. Wherever it is you go. The funeral. You were there twenty minutes.”
“Your father-in-law’s outfit wouldn’t start,” he said. “The old GMC. In the lot.” He set the wrench down on the tailgate and picked up the other one. “Had a bad ground on it. I got that going and then Mel Deitz’s wife was blocked in, so I moved him, and then I run Anselm and them back to Nyssa because there wasn’t room in the cars. Got back about four. Everybody’d gone.”
“You came back.”
“There wasn’t anybody there, Stell.” He got up on the deck of the trailer. “Hand me that up.”
We got water at ten past two on the fourth morning. The hand happened about forty minutes before that and I did not see it, because I had gone up to the house for coffee, and when I came back he had it wrapped in a shop rag and he was setting the pitless and he told me the well would need a day to come back and to keep the cows off it till noon.
He drove himself to Ontario at six that morning. Two surgeries. He works now but he cannot do the four-day thing anymore and both of us know it and neither of us has said it.
I watched a man go through a bad stretch and decided it was his to have, which is what neighbors decide. Four hard days is four hard days. When it does not come back up — when a person is still not right in month three, when the not-sleeping has quit being about anything that happened — a casserole does not reach it, and neither does anything I could write down here. That is doctor work, or a licensed counselor’s. Somebody in the room ought to say so plainly instead of being neighborly about it, so I am saying it.
He was in the shop most nights that spring with the hand in a brace, doing things one-handed that did not need doing.
In May I wrote him a check for eleven thousand dollars, which is not what four days and a hand are worth, and I brought it out to the shop and put it on the bench.
He looked at it for a while. Then he said, “What’s this for?”
And I got ugly. I said, “Take the check, Hollis.” I said, “For once in your life just take the thing and say thank you.” I said some more after that.
He put it in his shirt pocket and got back on the bench and started in on a rear wheel bearing. He has never cashed it. I know that because I balance my own account.
What Is the ISTP Personality Type: Drawdown and Recovery
You cannot learn a well by looking at it. Water sits at a static level in there and it will sit there all year and tell you nothing. What you do is you pull on it hard — you run the pump wide open and you watch how far the level falls and how fast it comes back when you shut down. Drawdown and recovery. It is the only test there is. A well that looks identical to another well at rest can be a completely different well the minute you ask something of it. The national tally every chart traces back to puts it a bit over five in a hundred, more than three men for every woman.
I had thirty-four years of Hollis Purdy at static level and about ninety hours of him drawn down and I learned more in the ninety.
I sat down in March of 2025 and looked those letters up, eight and a half years after my granddaughter read them out on the Owyhee road.
I — this is the one I got backwards for three decades. It does not mean quiet, because he is not quiet. It means the working-out happens on the inside with the door shut and comes out finished.
S — what is actually here arrives first, by hand and by eye, and any idea about it waits its turn. A split in a pipe found by feel in the dark.
T — a question is settled for him when the thing holds together, and who gets hurt by it is a separate department. Unkind is the wrong word. That scale is not the one in his hand, and leaving it off does not register with him as leaving anything off.
P — he does not close a question until the situation makes him. Everything stays open, everything stays adjustable, and this is why there is nothing written on that calendar.
Below the letters there are four habits with a pecking order to them, and that pecking order is the entire difference between one of these people and the next one over. Here the private working-out comes first and the physical present comes second, which between them make a man who walks up on a wellhead and has it inside four minutes and cannot tell you how, and who is wholly wherever his hands are with nothing kept back.
Which is the answer to the question I had been asking wrong since 1992. There is no somewhere else. There never was. The half of him I thought was missing was not off in some interior country he wouldn’t show me. It was in a parking lot in Adrian, under the hood of a GMC.
Some numbers, since I spent twenty-two years watching who checks out what and I have opinions about counting. Call it five people in a hundred, and better than three out of four of those are men, which is a lopsidedness worth staring at and which does different things to the ones it happens to. As for every other figure you will see: those tables are mostly built out of people who came looking, or who were handed a questionnaire at work, and asking who comes to the desk tells you about the desk. It does not tell you about the town.
And one line on how much weight the apparatus carries, because that deserves a sentence and not a footnote. The four measures underneath are measuring something, and they hold up when you take them again. The step after — cutting four measures into sixteen named drawers — is a cataloging decision, and cataloging decisions get made by people who have a shelf to fill. Keep using the drawers. Just remember somebody chose them. And every word above describes an average of people you have never met, so if you came looking to be accounted for, watch for where the account quits matching. Everything up to there belongs to five people in a hundred. That spot is yours alone.
ISTP Cognitive Functions: Where He Keeps the Arithmetic
The first habit is private and it is not a mood. If you want the official ledger, it runs introverted thinking, then extraverted sensing, then introverted intuition, with extraverted feeling bringing up the rear.
It is a working-out. He has a model of how a thing hangs together and he runs it against what is in front of him, continuously, alone, and he will not tell you the answer until it is finished because an unfinished answer is not an answer. That is why he showed the Meyers the control box he already knew was fine. He was not managing their feelings. He was not going to say check valve out loud until the box was eliminated in front of a witness, and the witness was him.
The second habit is the one that made me wrong for thirty-four years, and it is the physical present.
Whatever is in front of him gets all of it. Not most. All. And the corollary is the ugly part and it does not soften: when you are not the thing in front of him, you get nothing, and there is no reserve tank, and it is not being withheld. Ask a man like this where he goes and the honest answer is a place, with a road to it, and if you were looking for a second answer underneath that one there isn’t a second answer, and the day I understood that on a tailgate was not a happy day.
He has a third habit and he has almost no use for it: the long look, the thing that tells you where all this ends up. He does have it. He said the basin was going in 2019 and he was five years ahead of the state of Oregon. What he will not do is trust it, or act on it, or say it twice, because it does not arrive in a form he can check with his hands, and he has never in his life said a thing out loud that he could not check.
And the fourth chair, the one with nothing in it, is the one everybody in his life has stood in front of. It is the register where you say what a person is to you. There is no equipment in there. A check on a bench is genuinely unintelligible to him, and being thanked is a kind of weather he waits out.
Arletta told me at the fairgrounds two summers ago that she left in 2003 because she wanted to live in a town and had wanted to since she was nineteen, and she said it easily, like it was old and settled.
I don’t buy it. I never have, and I will not pretend otherwise here.
ISTP Relationships and Compatibility: Standing in Front of Him
What it is like: for thirty-four years I got the whole of a person’s attention at a level almost nobody alive gets it, in doses of two hours to ninety, at intervals I did not control and could not predict, and in between I got a truck going by on the county road.
Nothing was being managed. Nothing was being saved for somebody better. That is the part I could not make myself believe, because it would have been easier to be neglected on purpose than to find out that presence, from him, is a thing with an on and an off and no dimmer on it.
The November after Guy died I could not be in that house at night and I called Hollis at nine o’clock, which I had never done and have not done since, and I did not say why, because you don’t. He was there in eleven minutes. He went straight through the kitchen to the swamp cooler that had been ticking since August, and he pulled the motor and took it out to the truck and had it back in and running by ten thirty, and he said the bearing was gone and I’d want to drain the line before it froze, and then he left.
I was angry about that for nine years. Somewhere in the last eighteen months it has stopped being a story about a man who could not sit with me for an hour and started being a story about a man who came in eleven minutes at nine o’clock at night to a house he had no reason to be at, and did the one thing in that house he had a tool for. I cannot get both of those to be true at once, and I have stopped requiring it.
What that arrangement does inside a marriage, at a kitchen table across from it every night instead of on a sidehill twice a year, is a set of rooms I was never in and belongs to whoever was. And the same on-and-off gets received two different ways depending on who is doing the receiving and what they were promised.
He knows my left hip is the bad one and which gate on the county road is hung wrong and that I take my coffee with nothing in it. He has never asked me a question about myself. Both of those are true and I have quit trying to make them into one sentence.
ISTP Careers: The Man They Call at Eleven at Night
The trade found him and he has never once looked up from it. He is not building anything. There is no second location and there is no boy being trained, and Britt says he has turned down three people who wanted to buy the business, and the business is a truck and a hand and a phone number that everybody in the south end of this county has memorized.
Which is worth saying plainly: what an outfit usually does with one of these is post him where the emergencies are, take twenty-five years of the best judgment in the building out of him at an hourly rate, and then wonder why he will not come to the meetings. He is not in there building a position. A meeting is not a thing in front of him, and a thing that is not in front of him does not exist.
He charges ninety-five an hour and a hundred and forty after ten at night, and he has not raised either number since 2021, and he does not bill for the drive, and the drive out to Chalk Basin is fifty minutes.
Who gets paid for this and who gets called for it are two different questions, and the second one has a different answer, and sorting that out belongs to somebody who has set a rate, which I never have. And the same skill does not get read the same way on every person who walks in carrying it, which is another article and not mine.
ISTP Personal Growth: The Outboard
There is a 1974 outboard on a stand in the north corner of that shop and it has been there since 2005. He has had it completely apart and back together eleven times that I know of. It has never been in water. I have asked twice and gotten a carburetor answer both times.
The growth writing for this type says to work on expressing feelings and I would like to meet the man who did that off a page.
Here is the only thing of that kind I ever witnessed, and it is small, and I will not dress it up as more. Standing on a tailgate at one in the morning at eight degrees, a man who had never given me a sentence about himself in thirty-three years gave me four, because I asked him a direct question about a specific night and there was a wrench in his hand. That is the whole of it. It was in him. What it needed was a question with a date on it, something to do while he answered, and nobody looking at his face.
I have thought about how to make those conditions on purpose and I have concluded you cannot, and that people who love one of these people spend a lot of years trying.
I go down there more now. I tell myself it is different since February. It is not different. He is exactly the same man he was in 1992 and I am the one who moved, and I would rather write that down than have somebody read this and think there was a happy ending in it for me.
Last Thursday I stood in the doorway of that shop for twenty-five minutes while he explained the float in the outboard’s carburetor for what I would guess is the fifth time, and I looked at his left hand doing it, and at some point I said I had to get back and I went out across the apron to the truck.
He was still going when I got to the door. He does not need you in the room. Something about a brass float and how they go porous, and a boat he has never mentioned to me, and how you can hear it if you shake it.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.