An interruption in the force has me hassling to get some water back in my house. I came back home from doing errands and saw my younger brother standing by the side of the road talking with the water meter guy from the County. They were standing right there by my water meter, so I figured I better check it out.
As I drove toward them my brother started waving me down. I stopped back aways from where they were, got out, and walked over to them to see what the problem was. There was obviously a problem, and as I greeted them I immediately knew the problem was mine. My underground water pipe that led from the county's meter next to the paved road was leaking. My brother seemed tickled when he told me that the busted pipe had already leaked 450,000 gallons of water between the water meter and my house. I was gonna have to pay for it. Not good. Not good at all.
I was a worried man. They showed me where the water had come up out of the ground before the meter man shut it off. It was a nice round hole about a foot in diameter. The ground around it was soaked to mush. My brother speculated that the pipe was burst by a young pine tree that had grown up right beside it since I had put the pipe in the ground a decade or so ago.
It turns out that the county has a plan that allows for leaks like this to happen once every two years. The meter man named Mike seemed nice, and he told me about it, and gave me the phone number to reach his boss. He seemed eager that I should call him right away. He said he had already talked to him about my situation.
I came to the house and called him. Mike's boss told me not to worry about it, we would negotiate a settlement price after they figured out my average bill for the last three months. He seemed to think everything will work out, but my problem is that it's up to them. I hate being under the gun.
I got a shovel, an axe, and some pruning loppers and went to start digging up around where the water came outta the ground. The rheumatoid arthritis isn't the best disease to have for digging up pipe in order to fix it. First, I had to clean all the underbrush and briars from where I had to dig. That alone took about an hour. Then I started digging, but it wasn't like digging in the regular sandy soil prevalent here on the coastal plains. I was digging in mud.
My practically new shoes only two weeks old look like crap. I worked until about dark time and began to see what had caused the problem. The roots of the pine tree had indeed caused the leak. There were two pipes buried in the same ditch. One went to my house and the other to my youngest brother who lives further back in the woods.
The two pipes were laying one on top of the other in the narrow trench we dug with a rented machine. The pine tree had a larger root that ran below the lower pipe, a root between the two pipes, and a root above both pipes. All the roots were larger than the pipes themselves.
I parked my car nearby so I'd have a place to sit down when i got tired. I knew I'd get tired whether I had RA or not. The medicine I'm taking for it makes me tired, and I'll be seventy in a couple of months. I worked for a while and then rested for a while.
I was working when this little red car passed by on the paved road. The paved road dead-ends about a 150 yards away where my parent's driveway used to be. I knew they would come back by, but I didn't expect them to stop. A young man and woman got out and ask if they could talk to me. I nodded, and they said they were newspaper reporters.
I talked with them for a while. The woman was supposed to be the writer, and she began to ask me questions. She was not very good at it. I got bored. The young man saw that I was getting jiggy on purpose because she didn't know how to listen. I shined them on and soon enow they left. Since then I wondered if they were just using the reporter gig to case out my house to rob me. I shoulda asked for ID.
I kept digging and chopping roots for a while longer, and then gave it up and came back to the house. I realized that I wouldn't have any water for coffee tomorrow, so I went to the grocery store and got a couple of gallons. I'm not looking forward to getting that pipe fixed tomorrow. It may be raining and I won't get anything done. What a drag, man.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
