When good pipes go bad

Well, it's the beginning of a new week and my appreciation for technology has moved in a new, unexpected direction. I've become a big fan of a technological advance that isn't quite as modern as my other fascinations---but as I've learned, it's equally if not more important than the latest cell phone or newest computer.

Plumbing.

I'm still not any good at it and it frustrates me to madness, but I am sooooooo glad that it's there.

We had another little foray this week into the wonderful world of plumbing. Last night, after I was done putting my daughter to bed and making sure we were all ready to send her off to her youth conference in Denver the next morning, I went in to busy myself in my office. I was only beginning to unpile what I would be working with back onto my lap when she called out that she wanted me to come and listen to something.

I yelled back that I didn't have time. I was busy. I told her to go to bed and I'd listen to it later.

She was insistent. There was this annoying little sound that sounded like electronic static, she said. But everything in her room was off and she was really annoyed by it. She said sometimes it was louder, sometimes softer.

So, now annoyed myself, I put down all I was doing and went in and listened. We followed the sound over to a place on the wall in the corner. It sounded like the noise was coming from the other side of the wall. Or inside it. On the other side of that wall of her room was the inside of a little closet in my makeshift office. So around I went, back into my office stepping over piles of file folders and electronic components and squeezing past the metal shelves I had installed in the closet where once a dowel had held clothes.

Once inside the tight narrow closet, I followed the sound to where there was a shelf space about the size of a mini fridge three feet off the ground. It was an area that had previously been walled off using a piece of paneling by the people who originally build these two little back to back rooms in the front of the basement, but I had at removed the rectangle of wood at one point to use the space for more storage. I had put cardboard boxes full of cables and old computer keyboards in there among the bare 2x4s, insulation and pipes.

Yes, I said pipes.

We tracked the sound down to back of the cubby hole, and when I went to push one of the boxes aside to get a deeper look, I discovered to my dismay that the cardboard had turned to oatmeal. The boxes hadn't been anywhere near the pipes, but they were close enough that whatever was happening back there had gotten them soaked to uselessness.

It's at this point that I'd like to take a moment to do my parents some justice. I know I've been dwelling a little lately on the issues we've been having as new homeowners, but I don't want to give the impression that our new house is a dump that is falling down around our ears and my folks who sold it to us are in Rio toasting the scam with the cash from our home loan.

They are behind us 100% and this has been a wonderful house. We love having a place with room for all the kids and their friends and our friends. A place for having picnics under the arbor covering the patio in the back yard during the summer while the kids run around in the grass. And in the evening when the firefly catching is over, it's great to have this place to snuggle down in where everyone can be safely tucked away for the night.

Back when we were a family of four (and soon another one on the way), we came to this house after living in a two bedroom apartment in the middle of the city where the only grass around us was a token strip by the sidewalk the size of a beach towel. There is not a day that goes by that I'm not humbled by the blessing that this house has been in our lives.

But when you get that mote in your eye, it's all you can think about and talk about. And this is where I do that, I guess.

So, back in the closet, I was finally able to move all the stuff to new boxes and get back in the cubby hole with the insulation and the pipes----and there it was. A thin little stream of water shooting in a tiny arch that sparkled in the light of the bare 60 watt bulb of the closet.

The elbow joint on the copper water supply line pipe coming into the house (but after the shut off valve, thankfully) had sprung a little pin hole leak and the sound that Kitten had heard was that thin little spray hitting the back of the drywall along one side of her room.

Kitten was the hero. I had been irritated. I had wanted to wait till later. Probably till after she returned from her trip in 5 day. It was obvious now that this course of action would have lead to a much larger disaster.

The spray was small, but we'd had a similar little pinhole problem in a different part of this same line back when we first moved in that went unnoticed for months and ended up soaking the whole carpet in that room. Worse yet, if the straight piece in that elbow joint had worked it's way loose, we could have had some serious flooding. Suddenly, this was one time I appreciated her teen-age propensity to not take no for an answer.

(One time. ONE. Hear that Kitten? This ONE time. Ok.)

So, here we were, faced with another evening with the water off. Luckily most everyone was already asleep. But after several days with the water off last week and now last night, this is where the appreciation for plumbing comes in.

I have taken plumbing for granted all my life as something just as much a part of civilization as clothes, and a convention just as ancient. Yet, we just celebrated the 100th birthday of our nextdoor neighbor this past Sunday, and when I think about it I realize that she would have been a person who had grown up in the Midwest in a time when back yard pumps and out-houses were more the standard. I realize now that I know and interact with a person who would have experienced a world transitioning to indoor plumbing in a not so far off time.

Once I went off in a speech class I was teaching, describing another cultural transition I myself remembered. It was not so long ago, when people, city people, would trundle out all a-buzz to the appliance store just to see some new crazy invention. They would arrive at the store and quickly move to the correct isle where a demonstrator would be describing the way this device would change our daily lives forever, like he was hawking snake oil. It was said that this thing could make water boil almost instantly, and without a heating element.

A glass of water was placed inside and the group jockied for position to peer through the darkened glass on the front of this little metal cabinet. Indeed, within seconds of the man turning the timer, the water was boiling right before our very eyes. He would open the front door and people would reach in to confirm that the glass of water was indeed hot, and then place their hands on the miraculously cool white sides of the little oven. The eyes of the people in the group would look in wonder.

They called this amazing new invention the microwave!

This was all lost on the room full of recent high school graduates I was telling this to. They did not seem to grasp was a marvel it was and I received stares like they were expecting next to hear my stories of coming over on the Mayflower or my lunch with Napoleon.

But how quickly the newness fades and becomes mundane. I remembered coming into that same store and down that same isle just a season later and seeing the wonder box sitting there on the same shelf like a faded rock star, ignored by all who passed. The lack of bustling people now a mocking reminder of what once was. The glass was still inside but now crusted with water deposits as if to say, "if you want to see the marvel, do it yourself. No fanfare here anymore".

According to the History of Plumbing website (isn't the stuff on the Internet great), indoor water like we have now only really came about in the early 1900's, and of course it wasn't very widespread yet at that point. The growth of indoor plumbing really occurred between the 1920s and the 1950s in America, according to the site. So much so, though, that today any place that doesn't have running water is considered "high adventure camping"---as few as 55 years later.

Now consider the computer----a trip over to ComputerHistory.org will show that the first designs for a stored program computer were developed as early as 1945. Granted that the computer and plumbing each have a long history of predecessors, but in their current incarnations they both came into being at roughly the same timeframe. Yet, the Internet, a network of computers into peoples homes, is still making headlines---while the network of pipes into all of our homes hardly merits a whisper today. Except to be cursed when it's spewing it's cargo onto your DVD collection.

But not by me. Not anymore. I've gained a new appreciation over the last 10 days. That plumber that showed up this morning and set things right is as big a hero to me as Bill Gates. Of course, I'm a Mac person so that's not a huge stretch, but still, you get the idea.

Then that got me to thinking about what it would have been like back in the day--always needing to think about water management--having to stay close to rivers or dig wells and pray for rain out of a concern for running out of this precious life giving liquid? And what about the guys on the cattle drives going across the deserts with only their canteen.

And then I got to thinking, when those guys on those cattle drives were riding across those dry arid wastelands with only cactus and dirt as far as the eye could see--what did they use for toilet paper?

Dude. Forget about rustlers and coyotes and hostile indigenous tribes threatening them with death at every turn like the old westerns glamorize. Think of the e-coli issues they must have had going through those camps. I'm surprised any of them made it through alive.

No wonder you never see them shaking hands in those movies except with gloves on. Maybe that's why you always hear of them eating nothing but beans for months. Get themselves good and blocked up so it wasn't an issue.

In the end I must confess, if I was forced to make the choice between the World Wide Web or flush toilets---just call me Analog Willie.

Yippie-ki-yi-ay.