Indoor Plumbing

We have been having some intermittent problems with our water system in our small subdivision of nine or ten homes which share a community well.  For 30 years or so, I was the President of our P.O.A. (an office in which I have often found myself over the years), but one of our neighbors, Bill, a retiree with a mechanical engineering background, seemed eager to take on some responsibilities, so I was able to shift this burden to him a few years ago.  Bill pays the electrical bill for the well and holding tank and also arranges to have the one unpaved subdivision road scraped from time to time.  He also pulls in the driveway and taps on the back door when there is a problem.

That's what he did Tuesday night.  "I'm out of water," he announced; "how about you?"  We are always the last home to lose water supply when there is an outage because our house is closest to the well and lowest in elevation in the subdivision.  I had not noticed any reduction in pressure, but last night we did.  A local plumber diagnosed a faulty pressure switch, and as our water pressure declined steadily throughout the day, we awaited delivery and installation of the switch.  Finally, the welcome sight of Gibson Plumbing's white van came down the road - two of them, in fact - and while we were eating dinner outside on the deck, we could hear them talking and sliding the cover off the well.  In a little while, the vans left, one after the other, but our water pressure remained low.  Finally Bill called:  "Bad news.  Tim said it's the pump.  I'll have to call Hedden Brothers Well Drilling in the morning."

We are accustomed to power outages, and when the power goes out the water goes out.  So we set to work filling buckets to flush toilets, filling pitchers with drinking water, quickly washing dishes, and preparing for the worst.  By bedtime there was barely enough of a trickle to take a sponge bath.  And this morning, nothing. 

It did not take long for Hedden Brothers to arrive this morning from Franklin, with an easy-going but skilled crew of three and their well-drilling rig.  To make a long story short, the electrical wire to the pump was hanging by a thread, so we decided to replace wire and pump both.  In no time they had the old pump out and the new one in, and we returned from out-of-town shopping this afternoon to the wonderful sight and sound of water gushing freely from all the faucets.

What a wonderful thing it is to have indoor plumbing!  I do not enjoy skipping showers, pouring buckets into toilets to flush them, or leaving dishes unwashed in the sink.  And yet I realize that most of the people in the world do not have this convenience that we take for granted. A new study in Environmental Science & Technology estimates that six our of ten people on Planet Earth - 4.2 billion human beings - do not have access to flush toilets or adequate water-related sanitation.  My own mother, who grew up poor in rural Eastern North Carolina, often spoke of not having indoor plumbing well into her late teens.

And, for the briefest of time, we shared the experience of these 4.2 billion human beings, reminding us once more in a very real way how much we take for granted every day.