Letter From America: Until the Well Runs Dry
My wife, Gay, and I live on a three-acre spread, ten miles outside the City of Troy, population 900. The City boasts a doctor, a dentist, a veterinarian, a library, three schools, a bowling alley, a medium sized grocery store, a variety of eating places, a cinema, a music shop, three second-hand shops, two petrol stations, and no traffic lights, writes Ronnie Bray.
The nearest supermarket is seventy-five miles west in Idaho, so we have adapted to doing without things we want, and make do with what we really
need. Our freezer is stocked with sale meat, and gifts from friends emptying their freezers ready for the hunting season. Our cupboards are crammed with tinned goods from the City grocer's annual case sale.
We sit in our cabin and look through the windows at moose, squirrels, elk, bears, deer, eagles, and other wild life that wanders through our spread. When that becomes wearisome, we turn on our all-region VCR/DVD and watch episodes of The Last of the Summer Wine, Mr Bean, Fawlty Towers, Hobson's Choice, Gilbert and Sullivan, and other reminders of home.
I make a weekly telephone call to my Mother, Louie, occasionally call my sister René, brother Arthur, and try to speak with brother George, who has had a mobile for three years but has not yet discovered how to turn it on!
I call old friends, and enjoy bitter-sweet pain remembering common experiences, recalling the streets we walked, the people we knew, the places
we lived, our friends with whom we laugh and cry recounting triumphs and disappointments, sighting and for days that are gone that live only in our diminishing memories.
Yet, life is good, informed by my Huddersfield Heritage, and gilded by slow days in the wilderness of Montana among a practical ready-to-help people who have not yielded to militant isolationism, but balance cheerful dispositions with that sense of fair play that civilised the West, where the gun and fist had failed. These are people who know the ways of wild things, and for whom hunting and fishing for the table are natural pastimes. We might not have all the comforts of home, or everything we want, but we have all we need.
Except ... well, the water stopped running yesterday. I told Terry, when he called, neighbourly-like, to see how we were coping with minus thirty Centigrade. Terry called Jack, Jack called Bob, and Bob came by to see if he could un-thaw (I know!) the frozen pipes. No joy. I put a 1500-watt heater in the hot water cupboard overnight, and insulated the door, but this morning we still had no water. I decided to try putting a heater in the well house in case frost had frozen the pressure switch open.
After shovelling two feet of snow and ice off the well house roof, I swung it up and climbed inside, only to find the pipes from the well riser to the house supply were frozen and cracked wide open. I called every well-water repairman in Lincoln County and one over the border in Idaho, but they were all out mending frozen wells! So, I called Bob, and Bob called Jack and they came together and confirmed my diagnosis. Bob and Jack are inside the well house fixing the problem. Then, the water will run again.
Until then, we put melted snow in the toilet cistern, the dogs clean our plates, we are beginning to smell a little, and we have learned the truth of the old saying, "You never know the value of water until the well runs dry."
Amen.
Copyright © Ronnie Bray 2004
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
See more of Ronnie's writing at:
http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voice
http://www.2theheart.com/poetrycontest2003
E-mail Ronnie at: quill at libby dot org
