Monday, January 14, 2008

www.whiteville.com

By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer

Several years ago, Brother Bill Weatherly and I were talking about water at the Kelly store.

It was a particularly hot day, and I had purchased a bottle of water. He joked about how, when he was a child, a local curmudgeon would grumble when kids had a nickel or a dime and were fit to bust wide open to get to a store just to spend that change.

“He told us we’d probably buy water if we couldn’t find anything else,” Brother Bill said.

Those words echoed in my mind for much of a recent week, because I would cheerfully have bought water, and by the truckload.

It was my own fault. I neglected to replace the light in the pump house, and our pump froze solid, cracking the bellhousing. I don’t like to run faucets all night, since it wastes water (and I once had a drain clog up on a 19 degree night, but ice-skating in the kitchen is a column for another day).

The pump froze on Monday night, and the adventure began.

First I got a refurbished pump from Mr. Vernon Ward in Whiteville. That had to wait until Wednesday, because I didn’t discover for certain that the old pump was gone until Tuesday night. Missus was on her way home from a wedding when I gave her the bad news, and she picked up several gallons at the grocery store.

We thought were in good shape. We had enough water for the night and the morning (well, almost) and Your Correspondent was confident he could take an electric motor, a handful of pipes, and an air tank and make water.

But I couldn’t figure out how to hook the darn thing up.

What should have been a fairly easy (if cold and wet) process required three trips to the big benchvise in the carport, two trips to town, and at 10:45 p.m., one more fitting.

Several more gallon jugs, and a visit to a store which I knew was closed but had an outside spigot for just such emergencies, and I was ready to try again. I stopped by another store to pick up the last required fitting, and ran into a friend, Dale Brennan. In addition to being one of the finest firefighters I’ve ever known, Dale knows something about pipes and plumbing. He volunteered to come down and give me a hand.

By 10 that night, success. There was water flowing through the pipes of our old house. Missus took a shower. I made coffee that didn’t require going out to the porch, finding a gallon jug, mentally calculating the remaining supply of water, and adjusting the coffee pot to make sure we had enough water for the dogs, cats, hog, goat, chickens, ducks, geese, and people.

I thumped my chest and smiled. Even though I needed the help of a knowledgeable friend, we had water again.

By the next morning, though, pressure was dropping again, and the pump was doing odd things. Sometimes it would come on and run the pressure to 100 pounds or more. Sometimes it would just snap and spit once or twice, like an angry mother-in-law. One thing it didn’t do was pull water out of the ground and send it into the house. It also didn’t provide enough water to finish washing a load of clothes, so not only was I dirty, but my clothes were as well.

Back to square one.

I spent a good part of the next Saturday trying to convince the pump to continue working, to no avail. By this point, at the risk of being indelicate, I was in need of something more than the perfunctory bird-bath taken in an old washbasin heated on the stove.

I didn’t exactly reek, but I was beginning to smell a bit ripe. The goat no longer climbed over my shoulder to see what I was doing; it seems I even smelled too bad for him, and if you’ve ever smelled a goat, you know that’s an accomplishment.
I needed a shower, but we needed water.

You don’t realize how much you miss water until you can’t turn the tap and fill a glass. Before Miss Rhonda and I were married, I lived in an old farmhouse with a pitcher pump in the front yard, but I was also younger, it was summer, and I could bathe at my folks’ house.

I came to appreciate what folks went through before they had running water. Back then, I could put those sacrifices and experiences into the proper philosophical perspective and reflect on how blessed we are with so many modern advances.

A decade and a half later, though, I just wanted a shower and a cup of coffee.

A series of heavy rains gave Miss Rhonda the idea to fill every feed bucket we had with roof-runoff, and that provided enough for the pets and the livestock.

Naturally, as soon as we’d emptied some of the buckets, the rain cleared out, but at least the Lord provided us with that much.

Despite having a houseful of family, James Potter came up after church and determined what I feared to be the case – some gidget or wadgett in the motor wouldn’t work properly.

I finally gave up and called Kendale Potter, who now runs and owns the store where Mr. Bill and I laughed over buying water.

Even though it was a Sunday night, Kendale has a lot of his grandfather and father in him, and I’m pretty sure Mr. Sam or Sammy opened the store on more than one night when someone needed a water pump. Mr. Bill did too, I’m sure, during that interval before Kendale decided to return to his roots as a country store owner.

A half-hour later, I had a shiny new water pump in my truck, and was headed for home. Well before midnight, I was once again clean, wearing clean clothes, and drinking a cup of coffee produced by turning on the tap and filling up the pot.

If nothing else, the whole incident with the pump reminded me how some people still care enough to help others.

From Brother James testing the malfunctioning pump and offering to fetch jugs and loan us a shower, to Dale driving a dozen country miles on a wet and windy night to help defeat my incompetence at “pumping,” to Kendale opening the store, no questions asked, on a Sunday night, it made me feel good to see some folks – indeed, I think most folks – in southeastern Carolina still instinctively help people in need. Even Mr. Ward seemed concerned I would take it personally that the first pump failed at a critical time (obviously I didn’t).

Water really is the leveling factor between all of us; if you have any doubt that there are still good people around, I have a suggestion: just let your pump freeze. You’ll find out real fast who means it when they say the words, “Anything I can do, just let me know.”