Last time I was in SE New Mexico I noticed the little town we lived in (HOPE, NM) had filled in all it’s abandoned cisterns.
Bummer-people sure know how to keep kids from having fun now...
We had a tall cement cistern that was part of the stock-watering setup, but ranch next to ours had an old in-ground cistern-the rancher who lived there went on stock-buying trips to Mexico, like pretty much everyone else, but since his wife was from there, they would go more often than any of my family did.
That woman was hateful-she complained to our moms because we were in their orchard picking up the oranges that had fallen on the ground, even though she always left them there to rot. We all got scolded and threatened with a switching-we were pissed, so the next time they left on a trip, we went over there with a couple of bushel baskets, wrestled the cover off the cistern and tossed in all the oranges we found on the ground in the orchard, and covered the thing back up. The whole place smelled like rotted fruit by the time they got home, and we got scolded and restricted from riding the horses, shooting, or going out of the yard for a week that time, but we remained unrepentant...
Next time they left, we lit some stuff on fire in an underground storage room they had, but that is another story...