sunday welder

we drove up to the house the way we do most weekends, late on friday. the temperature dropped just like it does every time we leave the hudson valley, just like it did a few weeks ago when we had a little trouble with a wayward hot water pipe. but the temperature didn't get that low. just down to seven. seven ought to be fine. still, the first thing i did when i got into the house was turn on that hot water tap in that edge-of-the-house bathroom. water. good. so we settled in and spent all day saturday doing a whole lot of nothing. the weather was warm and everything began to melt. no more mad icicles hanging from the front porch ready to stab into the top of my skull. of course, all this water has to go somewhere. our little house is on a bit of a rise, with higher land just behind it. mostly, water runs out toward the street with only a small amount sticking around to menace our basement, and then only if there's been a monstrous amount of rain or snow. but our driveway is pretty much a dry riverbed in good weather. it channels most of the uphill water and, as a result, is a long, streetward-leaning ramp of ice right now. even in this warm weather.

this morning just as the sky was starting to show over the mountain, i heard what sounded like a very large amount of water being poured from a dizzying height onto a hard surface. i mentioned this to the sweetie who could sleep through a tornado filled with screaming banshees and motorcycles without mufflers. he made it as clear as he could that he hadn't heard any sort of menacing sound and that it wasn't menacing at any rate and i should go back to sleep. the small dogs disagreed and the three of us clomped downstairs. i took them out and nearly slid off the front yard which had managed to form itself, wonder twins-style, into a giant sheet of ice sloping cruelly toward the street. the dogs and i slid our way around the house, just checking things out. we managed to drag ourselves up to the porch and got ourselves back into the house. i built up the fire and went to that edge-of-the-house bathroom to wash my hands. nothing. nothing from either tap. nothing in the kitchen. the toilet didn't refill. this is not one of those in the house frozen pipe issues. this is bigger.

i attempted to wake the sweetie. this is a difficult task on a good day but i simply called up the stairs, "there's no water in the house!" and his innate frozen pipe fear, a fear lodged so deep the very words are enough to jolt him to action, screamed through the fog of sleep and woke him up. he clattered into jeans and shoes and a jacket and grabbed his trusty basement flashlight. there were bangs and clangs and all the sounds you'd expect if you fancied you had a haunted basement. he came up triumphant. it's not in our house! great. so the pipe is even less accessible than the ones buried in our walls. and it's sunday morning. church time for at least another hour or so.

we did what anyone in our position would do. we got dressed without showering and went out for breakfast. because when there's nothing to do but wait, why not pass the time with pancakes? when we returned, the sweetie called the woman across the street who runs the local b&b. she is incredibly sweet and offered us use of her bathrooms and showers. yes, she said, she had water. evidently she sang the praises of the local water and water pressure because that made the sweetie wonder later if maybe we had inadequate pipe out there under our yard. our water pressure doesn't allow a person to fill a bathtub. i mean, if you had about an hour and you didn't mind that the water would be cold by the time you got in, fine, but for all intents and purposes, we live in a shower-only house. so she had water and plenty of it but offered to call another neighbor, a woman who works with the strange kids the way i do, and then she called back to report that this other neighbor was also enjoying the luxury of water. the neighbor, however, knew, for reasons that shall remain a mystery, that yet another neighbor, gary, shared a water line with us.

the sweetie called gary and sure enough, gary, who lives just the other side of the factory, had water coming out of all his taps like any normal person would. a series of further calls elicited the name of the "water guy". the name was not the same as the name of the man who pulled up to the house last fall to introduce himself as the water guy. i liked him because he lived a few houses over from us (as does the rest of town, really) and had spent time in our house in the late seventies and early eighties, before whatever awfulness that happened got here. it seems that water guy passed on some time in the last year and there's a new one. with one of those names like jones or smith. common. so the sweetie looked up his name in the local phone book. sure enough there were plenty of folks with his last name. let's just use smith for now. most of those smiths lived on smith road. and quite a few of them had names beginning with the same letter. the sweetie called the smith we were looking for and nobody answered. so he called the next smith who told him that the smith he was asking for was in florida but that smith wasn't really the smith we wanted in the first place. he gave the name of another smith and the sweetie called.

relatively quickly the smith showed up at the foot of our driveway and began poking around for access to some sort of pipe. the sweetie joined him and i could hear their laughter through our not-yet-insulated walls. now, if you're not from a small town, the next part may confuse you so here's the rule. if two or more men are standing around outside and at least one of them is parked in a way that indicates he doesn't really care that part of his truck (it will always be a truck) may or may not be a little bit in the actual road, and if the men are staring at some sort of thing (engine, pipe, downed electrical wire, dead deer), then other men are actually obligated to stop and offer suggestions, support, help or an audience. if a passing man actually knows any of the other men standing around and he doesn't stop, i suspect he is somehow kicked out of a variety of secret societies involving men standing around. so when our local arborist stopped his truck across the street and walked over to join the sweetie and the smith, my biggest concerns were, in this order: how many more would stop by? would any of this standing around lead to action that might get water into my house? how could i offer these guys coffee or tea when i had no water?

fortunately, the group stayed at three and then the sweetie and the smith came on into the house and prowled around the basement. the sweetie ran up after a few minutes and i heard him rummaging around in the kitchen. i went in to find him standing in the middle of his completely disassembled tool box with the nozzle for a propane torch in one hand. he looked wild, feverish. he ran out to the garage and when i smelled propane wafting up through the floor a bit later, i figured he found the propane canister somewhere. i should say here that the sweetie spends his days in an academic setting. a college. a film school. i think there are few things he loves as much as an opportunity to root around in the basement with a propane torch and some wrenches. having an audience to confer with makes it even better. these small disasters we have are godsends for him. he and the smith determined that the problem is ours. our stupid pipe. the one that runs from the street to the house.

and here's why it froze on the warmest (45 degree) day of winter. all the snow and ice started to melt and seep into the ground. the ground is frozen. it stays that way until some time in may, usually and because everything on top also usually stays that way, it's no big deal. but all this melting water seeped down to where the pipe is and found itself feeling very cold. cold enough to freeze. so it froze and the pipe, not wanting to be left out of things, froze itself right up, too. why, you're asking, didn't all the other pipes freeze? good question. everyone esle in the entire town of 400 people on town water has some sort of monster connecting pipe. too big to freeze solid. so we have choices. shut the house down until spring thaw (that's mid-may for those of you who already forgot) or have somebody come out and fix it. now, reasonableness would tell a person to just shut the house down and spend the next few months of weekends in brooklyn pining for the snow and the mountains. but the sweetie found out how the process happens and it was all over. there's a guy on the way now, driving from more than an hour away, bringing his arc welder and some very long leads.

that's right. arc welder. i should probably tell you here that the sweetie priced the particular sort of welder needed for this sort of project and the $1,500.00 price tag is the only thing that kept him from doing it himself. here's how it works. i think. don't try this based on my assessment. look it up yourself. but what you do is hook the welder up somehow with one lead out there at the street and the far end of the pipe. the other lead is hooked up in the basement at the other end of the offending pipe. current passes through the pipe and, eventually, melts the ice. i'm not kidding. if you are reading this, dad, you are absolutely not ever allowed to attempt this.

so the sweetie is waiting for the welder. the sky outside looks like a missouri sky in may, all low, dark clouds threatening a million different things slamming into the mountains and doubling back. the weather hangs at 40. my kitchen floor is full or tools and small bags of nails, screws and other fasteners. a propane torch sits on the table next to a bottle of wine.