Tuesday night I decided that our water pressure was just too powerful. The shower even felt spiky at times. Our outdoor faucet dripped constantly. The evening dishwater was extra foamy.
“Something’s wrong,” I told M. “I think the pump’s running all the time.” Sure enough, when I investigated, the pump was stuck on–and the pressure gauge showed numbers twice as high as normal.
We resorted to using the electrical panel breaker as a water valve, turning the power to our neighbor’s barn–yes, we supply the neighbor’s barn with power, which then powers our water pump, which is also his cattle’s water pump–on for a few minutes to fill the pressure tank, then off until our faucets gurgled dry.
Figuring this all out required tramping up and down our driveway in the dark, crisp night with my big 4-D cell LED Maglite and in my pajama pants and work boots, so it wasn’t until late that I fell into a fitful sleep just dreading the inevitable maintenance call bill, bemoaning our electrical interconnectedness with the farmer whose cattle I’d just looked out for by closing the rickety poor man’s gate at the end of the driveway, since not providing power to the barn meant the electric fences along our driveway were just useless strands of metal string, and wondering how this pump situation–and the larger problem of our inseparability from providing current to the barn, for free–could be resolved most efficiently and inoffensively.
After all, no longer providing him free power might remove the farmer’s willingness to mow our pasture (he’s done it twice) or plow our driveway (once) or might make him park ungainly and trashed vehicles right by our property line or be a less nice person to us. Or maybe he’d make sure his cows got right up to the spring house, causing it to deteriorate even more rapidly than it already is.
And the solution to installing a new water and power line to a pump of our own didn’t seem that simple–too many complicating factors–until….
Before I woke up Wednesday morning, I had a dream, of course about my preoccupation matter at hand. In my dream I came up with the perfect solution for when we put in our own pump and water line: run a gravity-flow water line from the current pump house down hill to our property to a new pump house and pump of our own, which would then send the water up the hill to our house. Simple? You bet. But I hadn’t thought of it before.
I rolled out of bed, made sure the pump still wasn’t shutting off, called the farmer to let him know the situation and that I’d closed his gate, and headed off to school armed with the phone number to call the fix-it-up-chappies, who came out later and remedied the situation.
As I pulled through our barnyard driveway after school, there was the farmer.
“This is soppy,” he said. “I ought to bring a load of gravel down here. And thanks for calling to let me know about the pump and gate. When you get the bill, just give it to me–it’ll help pay for the power I use.”
Well.
