||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

Our 20-family water system sprang a leak. During some other era, that wouldn’t be terribly important, because our system draws from what seems to be an underground river that empties into the East Sound. We have an almost inexhaustible supply of moderately-poor-quality water.

But the state Department of Ecology demands that all water systems conserve their resources to the best of their abilities, regardless of source. From the state’s point of view, one size fits all, and if any system doesn’t comply with that edict, it would have to pay the penalty of a very large fine. Our system’s new-found leak was therefore truly serious, and it was a matter of luck that it was easily and quickly found.

It was at the lowest point in our system, below almost every service outlet. But there was no way to isolate the leak. To fix it, the entire system would need to be shut down for at least 24 whole hours, and then it would also have to run on vastly reduced pressure for another couple of days while the pipe cement developed full strength and the refilled dirt compacted to properly support the repaired pipe.

Do you remember the last time that your water-delivery system was shut down, and you had no water service? Yeah, I thought not. And neither did we. It was an interesting, new experience. We were advised to fill up our bathtub for general, around-the-house use, and to set up separate jugs for drinking-water treatment. To make it easier on ourselves, we got our already-jugged drinking water from Island Market, so the water in the bathtub was mostly for washing us and for flushing toilets.

Being without running water means that, whatever we did and whenever we did it, we had to think about it first. Want a drink? It might have to be boiled. Brush your teeth? Boil that too. Wash your hands? Bring a jug with you, or scurry back to the kitchen with the soap. And what about washing fruit and vegetables? Is untreated water OK for doing that? No? Well then, maybe we’d better boil that as well. And if you need to get up in the middle of the night, it would probably be better to wait to flush until the next morning. Dipping a bucket into the bathtub when half asleep and bleary-eyed can get awfully messy.

It’s so easy to take for granted having clean, potable water pouring out from several different spouts, some of it heated to almost sterilization temperature, and all right there, inside your own home. It’s a marvelous benefit of modern civilization. But, of course, it hasn’t always been thus. Fairly recently, many households had either a servant or a child whose job it was to draw and carry buckets of water, sometimes all day long. Well, there are still lots of places in today’s world where that servant or child has to walk a mile or more in each direction, to the water source and back, carrying the whole day’s supply. So we are thankful that we were locked into that sort of relationship merely with our bathtub, and very temporarily at that. Jack and Jill were we, and, thank Heaven, our home has no stairs.

Truth be told, the whole exercise was a complete pain in the posterior, even though it lasted only a mere 24 hours. As this is being written, civilization, in the form of clean, running water, has now returned to our 20-family water system, and therefore we have returned to the modern world once more. Looking back, we think that we’d like to keep it that way. We didn’t enjoy our brush with the 18th century.

As Joni Mitchell wrote and sang, back in 1970:
“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Till it’s gone…”


 

**If you are reading theOrcasonian for free, thank your fellow islanders. If you would like to support theOrcasonian CLICK HERE to set your modestly-priced, voluntary subscription. Otherwise, no worries; we’re happy to share with you.**