Whenever I turn on a faucet lately, I feel gratitude when water comes out. These rainless skies have my body on red alert. Under natural conditions, I would be migrating out of this semi-desert region, leaving the Lewis Creek watershed with no snow-capped mountains to feed it. Our unnatural water supply allows me to stay put.
We city slickers take it for granted that water will run into the sink or out of the hose with a simple turn of the handle. Nowadays, when you buy a house in town, you never ask whether it has running water, although you might question who supplies it. But it’s really only in my lifetime that such a luxury has come to be seen as a necessity, a given.
I grew up with indoor plumbing, but my mother did not. She was raised in the small town of Centralia, Washington in the 1930’s. She still has stories about meeting a hobo coming out of her family’s outhouse one morning as she went to go in, pretty scary for a young girl. The contrast between having a bathroom inside the house or having to go outside to the privy is something we heard about frequently growing up. I couldn’t remember if she had running water inside, however, so I asked her this weekend when we talked on the phone.
“We were on a well,” she said. “The pump was right by the back door, and you had to fill a jar with water to prime the pump the next time. If you forgot to fill that jar, you really got yelled at.” My mind followed hers: if you forgot, where would you get the water to prime your pump? No faucet to turn on. “We always had buckets of rain water sitting around,” she said later, “to wash our hair.” That would work in western Washington, but not here.
When she was in her teens, they remodeled the pantry into a bathroom with tub and sink (but no toilet, because it was too expensive to hook up to the city's sewer system.) They installed pipes and an electric pump which would kick on when you turned a faucet handle. “If you came home late from a date, you didn’t get yourself a drink of water because the folks would hear it. You just went to bed thirsty,” she said. That must have happened at least once for her to remember it so clearly.
She was glad I asked my question, and we strolled down other blocks of Memory Lane because of it, including a mental visit to the ladies' lounge in Centralia's Fox Theater ("So luxurious - and warm," she said.) I saw how these things that she experienced as deprivations shaped her future as a carpenter’s wife. Being married to someone who could build her a house with a full-service bathroom was a definite advance.
But it also made me aware how hard it’s going to be for us to down-scale our expectations about what happens when you turn on the faucet. Some people already have had to face the fact that there’s no guarantee there will be water running when they do. Some people already have had to face the fact that there’s no water for their groves, their income and life’s work evaporating into thin air.
Running water is a dividing line between real affluence and real poverty. I’m afraid we’ll see that gap widen if we don’t figure out some way to share the shortage this year.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a humid-clime ex-patriot who dehydrates easily, but writes anyway. You can send her your water stories c/o P.O.
Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
message below.
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