The Fate of the Free World

The night of the first snow of the season, we lost our water. Within an hour, I realized that the fate of the free world rests on our sewer system.

It took a week to get water running through our house again. A week to find the problems (a broken pipe which lead to a fault in the well pump), dig up the pipe, wait for parts, fix the pipe, fix the pump and test it all. A week of taking showers at work, filling up bottles of water and skulking them home for drinking and brushing teeth and rinsing off faces. A week of lots of eating out and lots of discussions of the form, “no you can’t wear your favorite jeans twice because they are dirty and can’t be washed”.

All that wasn’t horrible. Inconvenient but not horrible. The horrible part was the toilets. You know how bad low-flow toilets can be? Well, no-flow toilets are infinitely worse. And, it’s not like you can just ‘hold it’ until you get to work every morning.

The first day we pulled out some five gallon buckets, filled them with snow and carried them up the stairs. A trip to the bathroom involved pouring the melted snow into the toilet to aid the flushing process. Carrying buckets of snow up the stairs was better than carrying buckets of something else back down the stairs, but as the snow melted, that option melted away along with it.

We broke down, drove the tractor to the neighbors and begged them to let us fill up the 200 gallon water tank we brought with us. Okay, we didn’t really have to beg – they are very nice neighbors – but you still have to admit that it’s not every day that someone comes to your door and asks to borrow water so they can flush their toilets. At least we had a solution. Bill even hooked the tank up to the plumbing so that we could flush without carrying buckets up the stairs.

It all got me thinking, though, about our disaster preparedness. I mean, all of the survivalists packages I’ve seen (not that I spend a lot of time looking, mind you) include food, tablets for clean drinking water, candles, even weapons. But I’ve never seen any that include supplies for a “do it yourself” outhouse or a shovel to start digging. Not that most modern-day neighborhoods would support an outhouse in every yard anyway.

I understand that things would have been much worse if everyone had lost water the same time we did. If we were melting snow for drinking instead of toilet flushing, our situation would have seemed much more serious. But, still, just today on Facebook, someone posted the following: More people on our planet have a mobile phone than a toilet. So what? The majority of illness in the world is cause by poo. And we are definitely not set up to handle our own poo.

When I was a kid, my great-grandmother lived in a house that had indoor plumbing added as an afterthought. She still had an outhouse in her backyard and when they had big gatherings, some of the older folks continued to use it. Can you imagine going to your backyard today and starting to dig the hole? If war or a terrorist act wasn’t what sent you out there in the first place, it might be the result of you appearing with your shovel. And all those folks living in high-rise apartments are totally screwed in that sort of situation.

The day we turned back on the water, I made a spaghetti dinner, using lots of water straight from the tap. The washing machine and dish washer provided the background music and I ended the symphony with a couple of celebratory, non-rationed flushes.

We are a little better prepared now, the 200 gallon water tank always filled with water. I still worry. I don’t know about you, but I’d much prefer to live without a cell phone than indoor plumbing. Think about your answer to that question the next time you are perched on your throne, blissfully unaware of just how lucky you are.