spring

Once when I was up at the cabin hunting with my grandad, we were walking across the dam heading back to the cabin. He pointed down to the edge of the swamp below the lake and said there was a spring there. He said they used to get water from the spring. Everything was frozen by the time deer hunting season came around, so it wasn't much use then, but when they came to the cabin in the spring and summer, it used to provide nice clean water. He said they'd even put some barrels in the ground to collect the water to make it easier fill buckets and jugs, but he didn't know if the barrels were still there.
A couple of years later when I was there by myself in the summer, I remembered him telling me about the spring. I had been going out in the boat to get lake water, which looks black when you're in the boat looking down, and yellow when you put it in a jug or pot. My grandad had told me the color was from the roots of the tamarack trees in the swamp that Hoffman creek ran through. After drinking the yellowish lake water, which had a slightly "organic" taste, the thought of fresh clean clear spring water was pretty appealing.
I decided I'd see if I could find it. It was slow going because the swampy area was so overgrown with alder and other brush that was hard make my way through. I also wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for, and I found more than a few especially wet areas that I thought might lead to the spring, but didn't really lead anywhere. Then I got to the edge of the really swampy part and the ground started to rise and I noticed a small trickle of water coming from a little higher up. I followed it, and it lead to the spring. I cleared away some leaves and brush and there were two metal barrels set into the ground. It didn't really seem like much of a spring though. I was used to springs like in Berkeley Springs, where water gushed out of the ground. It seemed more like the water was seeping out of the ground in lots of different places. Still I thought it would be worth a try to clean out the barrels and see if they filled up with spring water.
One of the barrels seemed to have a little trickle of water coming out of it, and I started scooping out the leaves and debris. After the first couple of handfuls, I saw that there were two dead frogs floating in the barrel. That was pretty unappealing and didn't make the spring water seem very fresh or clean. But I used a stick to flick them out of the barrel and continued cleaning out debris until I got down to some sandy soil at the bottom which the water seemed to be rising up through to slowly fill the barrel up. The water seemed kind of rusty and not completely clear. I wasn't sure if it was just because of all the stuff I had just removed, or if the water coming up was like that.
I cleaned out the other barrel, which didn't seem to have as much water coming up into it and cleared away all of the leaves and sticks which were around the barrels. As I was pushing away some of the mud from around the barrels, I noticed they had green paint on the outside, and some kind of lettering. I thought maybe they were old civil defense water containers. I pushed away some more dirt to see if I could see what was written on them. In capital letters, with skull and cross bones below was written POTASSIUM CYANIDE.
Of course I knew the barrels would have been well cleaned before being used to collect spring water, but still, after seeing the dead frogs, skull and cross bones, and the word cyanide, it just didn't seem like a string of good omens. I waited for the water to refill the barrel anyway. I was sure the frogs had just hopped into the barrel and then couldn't get out because of the steep sides. The water was still looking a bit rusty and cloudy, so I cleaned out some more of the dirt at the bottom, and sloshed out as much of the water as I could and waited for it to refill. This time, after the remaining dirt settled, the water seemed less cloudy, but still kind of rusty, and there seemed to be some kind of thin almost oily film forming on the surface of the water.
My grandad had said they used to use this spring water for drinking, but that was probably twenty years ago, maybe more. I couldn't think of anything in the immediate area that would have contaminated a spring, but the rustiness and the film didn't inspire confidence. Neither did the dead frogs or the word cyanide.
I figured I'd stick with the lake water.