February 12, 2007

All’s Well That Ends Well

I’ve enjoyed the privileges of being a city boy for most of my life. This means that I have developed lungs that will filter more than two million toxic substances out of the air (these toxins apparently wind up in my liver, where they can be flushed out with periodic substantial doses of alcohol).

It also means that I have had access to “city water.”

OK, I’ll admit that this may not seem like a big plus when you sometimes have to push aside chunks of “city water” to get to the part you drink, or when you hear from the mayor that, “On the up side, no known bacteria could possibly survive in all that chemical pollution.”

But at least you know that when you turn the tap, something resembling water is going to come out. And on the very rare occasions when it doesn’t, you just have to wait a while until some guys in yellow-and-orange-striped vests come around and fix it. So you can imagine how disorienting it was when we moved into a house where we get our water from our own well.

I got a little nervous when, before we even moved in, they had to “test the well.” You see, over a lifetime of ingesting countless meals in diners with names like “Scabby Joe’s,” I have developed a philosophy that when it comes to washing down a mouthful of mystery meat, you’re better off just to shut your eyes and drink whatever the stuff is in the semi-opaque water glass with the antique lipstick marks. Reading any sort of pathology report on it would just lead to negative thoughts.

You can imagine how relieved I was when the news came back that our well was “certified.” The only specific thing I can remember about the report was that there were “acceptable levels of arsenic” - always a plus.

And then I forgot all about the whole issue until the first time our power went off.

Let’s put this in perspective. It’s not all that hard to stumble around the house for a few days with candles or a flashlight, and most of us can live that long without television. But a well plus no power equals no water.

Now, you can always buy bottled drinking water. What’s more, our old friend “beer” contains quite a bit of water to go along with its wonderful toxin-flushing qualities of (see paragraph one above). The trouble comes when all that beer has finished its job, and the word “flush” takes on a very different, much more functional meaning.

And then there was the first time the well itself broke. No matter how patiently I waited, nobody showed up wearing an orange-and-yellow striped vest. Eventually I had to get in the phone book and find a well-fixer guy.

After the well-fixer guy came, my first problem popped up when he asked “Where’s your well?” after which we spent the next half hour crawling around and searching in the bushes. Of course, I was really just keeping him company, since I had absolutely no idea what a well might look like – unless it had a bucket on a rope, along with a sign inviting us to toss in a coin and make a wish.

After we found the well, getting it fixed was fairly straightforward. All it took was a wheelbarrow full of money and a willingness to have an enormous truck parked in my front yard for a couple of days.

And now, years later, I’m an old hand at this whole business. I’m on a first-name basis with two generations of well-fixer guys, plus I know how to say come cool things like “holding tank” and “pressure gauge.” I don’t actually know what they mean, but I can say them.

And that’s a start.

Copyright © 2007, Michael Ball

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