Full tank, bliss. Empty tank, despair.
Empty your tanks and what have you got? Plenty of nothing, running on empty, sucking fumes.
But with a full tank, you can do anything.
As the Blues Brothers in their police cruiser set out to drive on the greatest car chase of all time, Elwood said to Jake “There are 106 miles to Chicago, we have a full tank of gas, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses”. Of course it was that full tank of gas that gave them the courage and craziness to save an orphanage at the paltry cost of 100 wrecked cars.
One tank of childhood memory was our rainwater tank, stoutly constructed of corrugated iron, catching runoff from the roof for our family ablutions, drinking water and cups of tea. It also excelled as a breeding pond for mosquitoes. The larvae or wrigglers ended up in the kitchen tap, in the cooking pot, in the kettle, down the hatch and onwards into the alimentary canal. Not a canal cruise I would personally look forward to.
No matter how well we sealed and screened the rain water inlet on the tank and cleaned the filter, those mosquitoes managed to get in there, and laid their eggs and sent them off to grow to parasitic maturity to irritate all and sundry. Somehow a glass of water with live wrigglers in it or a cup of tea with boiled wrigglers in it just never tastes right.
Some local water tank experts recommended pouring a layer of kerosene into the tank to form a mosquito proof film on top of the water. We decided we would rather ingest wrigglers than be poisoned by paraffin.
Despite this, we were ever thankful for the fresh-ish water flowing from the skies into the tank and down our throats keeping us alive.
One of my favourite tanks held air, not liquid. It was an air tank in the boss’s fancy European car in one of my first jobs. The car looked exotic and was quite expensive. For reasons unknown it had five cylinders rather than the traditional six. Perhaps the makers wanted to commemorate the Famous Five stories of their childhoods or the number of arms on a starfish. Perhaps they used the missing space for the air tank. This pneumatic cylinder held air under pressure to open and close the door locks – a primitive central locking system. However the air tank had a slow leak as air tanks often do. No one’s perfect. The air leaked out slowly over several hours, then a safety valve cut in and all the doors unlocked themselves with a sigh of relief. It annoyed the boss no end that he couldn’t keep his car locked for more than a few hours as it would eventually open itself up to all and sundry. We underlings had all sorts of fantasy plans for his unlockable car including offering it to the local stray dogs to play in and putting notes on the dashboard to call the police. But we never had the courage to carry out our schemes, or the inclination to forgo our pay cheques.
Other tanks I loved to hate were the stainless steel mixing tanks in my holiday job in a cosmetics factory. My task was to pour various foul liquids into this tank according to a strict recipe for nail polish and then mix them up. Have you ever interacted with nail polish? Smelled it? Read the warnings on the bottle? Wondered why nail polish technicians wear face masks? Have you considered why it is sold in very small bottles like restricted medication or poison? No wonder the top internet search question about nail polish is “Which brands are safe?”
Imagine an industrial tank full of the stuff being mixed together using a tank sized electric egg beater. It was eye watering, lung searing, nose assaulting. To add insult to injury my job description required me to climb inside the toxic tank when it was empty and clean it out with poisonous acetone and old rags.
To its credit that factory tank did its job faithfully. Being made of stainless steel it’s probably still alive and working well though dozens of people have died using it.
My favourite tanks come from the history of ancient Israel. King Herod the Great had constructed a fortress at Masada next to the Dead Sea on top of a mountain in the middle of a dry desert. Being a wily old fox been made sure he had plenty of water storage tanks cut into the stone mountain top, fed by storm runoff from the surrounding hills.
After the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, the local rebels bumped off the Roman garrison on Masada and took up residence there, amply supplied with water. Soon after, the Roman army, never known for its delicacy, built a siege ramp and battering ram against the side of the mountain fortress, intending to pay the rebels an unfriendly visit.
No doubt all this hard work in the hot desert made the old Romans a bit thirsty, so the rebels mocked them by pouring jugs of water from their huge water tanks on to the rascally Romans down below. There’s nothing worse when you’re really thirsty on a hot day than someone pouring water onto the sand in front of you while laughing like hyenas is there?
This tank story doesn’t end well however. Just before the Romans broke through into their fortress the well-hydrated rebels all did themselves in. At least they didn’t die of thirst.
-Geoff Milton
