Moon over Martinborough

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Rick and I had been living in the country for only a couple of months when Rick’s city friend Fiona came to visit.

Well in the olive grove

Fiona is like a graceful, exotic bird you feel compelled to pamper and adore, and Rick had promised her a relaxing country weekend far away from her stressful professional life. So it caused us great concern when, just hours after her arrival on Friday evening, our tap water suddenly stopped running.

I was in the kitchen preparing to cook dinner when I turned on the kitchen faucet and nothing came out. I checked the sink in the guest bathroom and found the same thing there.

Out on the deck I made the announcement.

“There’s no water.”

Rick and Fiona were talking on the white deck chairs. They looked at me blankly.

“What do you mean?” Rick said.

“When I turn on the tap, there’s no water.”

Rick looked horrified. We’d just had a new pump installed a few days before.

Fiona, always dignified, managed to hold her composure. She was wearing dramatic, flowing sleeves, a spiralling silver necklace, and beautiful baubles on her wrists and fingers. Her short, jet-black hair is graced with a white shock in front, and she has the knack of wearing makeup in such a way that you never notice it at all. You just notice how gorgeous she is.

She does not, in short, look like a woman who enjoys ‘roughing it.’

We have no emergency water tank. When our well is out, that means no drinking water, no cooking water, no flushing toilets, and no showers in the morning. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

Although I was sure Fiona could endure dehydration and starvation with charm and style, I was less certain about her ability to withstand an entire weekend without basic sanitation and bathing facilities. I could already imagine her speeding back over the Rimutaka Hill Road to the safety of the municipal water systems of Wellington, raving about the filth and squalor of the country.

Rick looked at me resolutely. “Well, can we fix it?”

If you knew us, you’d understand that this is pretty much the equivalent of expecting a pair of small, retarded dogs to dismantle a nuclear bomb.

Rick and I are hopeless at fixing household things, much less wells. We’re city boys, after all. We lived for years in apartments in Tokyo and Chicago. We’d never had a well before!

I looked over at Rick and then at Fiona. She hadn’t yet expressed the slightest concern over the situation, but there was a nervous twitch developing under her right eye.

Culvert and hay shed in distance

By then of course it was dark. Although it was a bit late on a Friday night, I quickly resigned myself to the fact that Rick and I are useless, and I did what any city boy stranded in the country without water would do. I called the neighbors.

Here is my advice. If you buy a house in the country, make sure you buy one that is next door to a Welsh mechanical engineer with a DIY fetish and the generous soul of a mad, tool-loving saint. That’s our neighbour Jim, husband to Kiwi Bronwyn. He has helped Rick and me more times than I can count. Without him, we would have been found dead in a corner long ago.

“I’ll meet you at your well at eight tomorrow morning,” he said. “Bring a spanner.” I’d been in New Zealand long enough to know that what he really meant to say was “Bring a wrench.”

We shut the power off to the well and went out for dinner.

Working on the well

The next morning (as Rick and Fiona sped off in Fiona’s Peugot to have breakfast in the village) I met Jim down by the well.

Jim was wearing the coveralls he always works in – with spots of dirt and grease all over, and the sleeves cut off because it gets hot in Martinborough in the summer. I was in clean shorts and a T-shirt, looking like I was more prepared to visit Disneyland than to do manual labor.

“Where’s your spanner?” he said.

I proudly pulled out my wrench. It came as part of a burgundy toolbox set I bought when I wanted to hang pictures in our first Wellington apartment.

Jim laughed. “You call that a spanner?!” Then he laughed some more, harder this time. Apparently my wrench was very funny.

Finally Jim held up a silver thing he’d had at his side. “THIS is a spanner!”

It was the same shape as mine, but it was absolutely the single most enormous wrench I have ever seen in my entire life. It was as long as his arm, I kid you not. He growled and held it up into the air in what looked like a Conan the Barbarian sword pose. I trembled.

Sun in the bottom paddock

After I hid my apartment-sized wrench in shame, we quickly got to work on the well. I have never been good with mechanical things. I remember working on cars with my dad back in Michigan – changing the oil, replacing brakes – and I never could get my head around what we were doing. It’s like as soon as someone opens the hood of a car, my brain is abducted by aliens.

Turns out the same thing happens when someone opens up a well.

Everything was in order, but the guys who’d worked on the well hadn’t fastened the pipes securely enough to accommodate the power of the new pump. A round, black turny thing holding two bits of plastic pipe together had come undone.

Jim showed me how to cut off the tattered end of the plastic pipe, wrap some non-sticky white tape around it (which makes a seal for the turny thing to screw into) and screw it all back together securely. We did some other stuff too, but who knows what it was. By that point my brain was floating in formaldehyde on its way to the outer reaches of the galaxy.

All I know is this: Jim worked with me on our well for most the morning. We did stuff. We made it better. He gave me a list of maintenance things to do, which I said I would do right away. I’m going to do them soon. I swear.

When we were finished that morning he crossed our paddocks to return to his house. I watched him go, carrying his enormous spanner, and I felt incredibly grateful.

By the time Fiona and Rick pulled up into the driveway – laughing and carrying on and looking very cosmopolitan in a kind of Eurotrash, unshowered way – life was back to normal. The well was perfect, and there was water every time we turned on the faucet.

Fiona ran immediately to the shower. The mad Welshman had saved the day.

What about you? Have you ever had your water go out? Or have you ever had a kind neighbor help you in a pinch? Leave a comment below.

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Podcast

Click the ‘play’ button below to listen to ‘The day the water stopped’ online, or download the MP3 for this podcast and others over in the podcast library.

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Wairarapa Lifestyle Magazine

‘The day the water stopped’ appeared in the Summer 09/10 issue of Wairarapa Lifestyle Magazine.

See other ‘Moon’ stories from Wairarapa Lifestyle Magazine.

You can find the magazine in the cafes and shops all over the Wairarapa. Check out the magazine’s website.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 9:20 am and is filed under Neighbors, New Zealand, Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.