Water Woes

The hose is froze.

Ungrammatical, perhaps, but it has a ring to it. Kind of a death knell.

Anyway. Water. Back in the city, I hardly ever thought about it, except when it was leaking into the basement or through the roof. Here, in the country, it's a pretty big deal. We practically live in one of the biggest rivers in the Maritimes, and yet we are slaves to modern technology's solution to fetching water, the electric pump. It's a heck of a long walk to the river, and toilets consume water like thirsty horses.

By the way, if I seem to be rambling it's only because I've just come off a two and a half day pump replacement nightmare/marathon. It happened right in the middle of helping to wrestle with the now expected winter freezing of the water supply line to the barn. So I've been letting myself get dehydrated, re-visiting Frank Hebert's Dune, while wondering how it is that we've let ourselves come to this.

Getting water to the barn at this time of year can be done by one woman, but it's hard. My sister manages it, even with a seven month old daughter, but it's no wonder that it sometimes gets left to the end of the day. I try my best to help - two women and a baby can do it pretty easily. The problem is that, no matter what we try,the hose freezes. It inevitably needs to be hauled in through the basement window to thaw, and, because it's frozen, it really doesn't want to bend, so it's somewhat like trying to force the Angus L. MacDonald Bridge into a boxcar. At this point, the window is pretty much ice welded into position, so you end up push-pulling the unwieldy thing through a slit just wide enough to accommodate it.

Of course this is not the way water is supposed to get to the barn. It's supposed to travel through an underground line to a handy faucet next to the bunny room. But that froze a month ago. There are plans afoot to get that fixed, but that is a summertime job. Remember summer? Oh yeah, that's when the mosquitoes are biting.... In the meantime, thirsty animals are waiting for a drink, so it's either one bucket at a time, or the jury rigged garden hose express.



Meanwhile, I decided it was time to replace the jet pump that has been caterwauling in the basement corner right under my favourite sunny perch in the living room. It has always been loud, but just lately it has been screeching like a banshee. It was an unknown number of years old, completely covered in rust, and looked kind of like it was on loan from some portion of a sunken ocean liner to begin with.



My sister had an old jet pump that was reputed to still be in working condition, so we liberated it from its shelf in the mouse museum of useful bits and bobs (aka the garden shed) and my Dad took it back to his shop to have a look at it. He got the motor running and acquired an arsenal of fittings and hoses to make it fit into the old pump's place.

Feeling cocky and spend-thrifty, we assembled early on Tuesday morning for the surgical procedure. Getting the old pump out was nasty. My son took most of the wetting, being down on the floor with the hacksaw and the wrench. The relatively dry gravel floor was soon a muddy swamp, and of course none of the hoses wanted to come off the old pump or go onto the new one, but, after a certain amount of wrestling with it and a few choice words, we got it installed. It was noon. We filled it with water, turned it on, and nothing much happened. The motor ran, but it didn't seem to be delivering water to the pressure tank. We turned it off, re-primed, and started it again. And gain. Until the motor seized up again.

Well, we decided that water was more important at this point than spendthriftiness, so we loaded up the family into the trusty Subaru wagon and headed for town. At Roblyn's Home Hardware in Oromocto, I reluctantly left yet another portion of my hard earned cash (about 40 pairs of earrings worth, I reckon, or 12 skeins of angora/mohair yarn), but I had the promise of water in a box, and an instruction manual to guide us through.

Turns out I was naive. It was another day and a half, and a visit from Oromocto Plumbers with a pump that actually worked before we were able to, somewhat tentatively at first, run the water again. Thanks to Mr. P, our family ombud/godfather, Home Hardware was happy to recompense us for some of this, in addition to a refund for the pump that didn't work. We are a little poorer but wiser these days, and truly appreciative of clean, relatively quiet, water on tap.