||| 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…”
Steve
When I saw your title I thought you were going to write about “air”. The smoke made me appreciate the simplicity of breathing good old clean air. Hope your water problem wasn’t going on during the smoke problem. That would be too much!
Steve
This reminded me of early growing up days when very often we would go to visit my great uncle from Norway, who lived full time in a log cabin that he built back in the woods on the Greenwater River on the way to Naches Pass. The cabin was on a high bank above the river, so to get water one took a bucket to a spot on the bank and hooked it into a clasp on a wire, and sent it zooming down the bank into the river to fill and then crank it back up. That was the job I loved. In those days, no one worried about drinking water directly out of a river or stream. When hiking, if one got thirsty, you just got down on your knees and drank. The mountain rivers and streams weren’t polluted then. Part of the good old days.
Sorry about your system leak. Not so much fun getting water out of the bath tub!
In the early 80’s Carla and I moved aboard our sailboat. She carried 100 gallons of water. We spent the next couple years living on the hook. Our showers were a dive over the side with a fresh water rinse after. Our galley had fresh and seawater foot pumps. The head was seawater overboard discharge. I set up a rain water catchment system to take advantage of the solid deck rails. We learned where abandoned and natural catchments were. In a pinch we could stretch the water for 3 to 4 weeks. We were a lot younger then.
Here on the Island our water system depends on an electric pump and a 50 gallon pressure tank. No water in a power outage….Opalco? We recently installed photovoltaic and battery backup…yea.
My mother was born and raised on a small farm in Oklahoma. Not a lot of water. They did have a handpump for grandma at the kitchen sink. All other water, including for the garden, was brought by bucket from the creek. Lucky they had 9 kids….and a two holer.
You do what you have to do.