Christmas 1982 will always stand out in my memory. I can’t recall what presents I got; I have never been a big Christmas person anyway. This Christmas stands out because of what happened when we came home from the family gathering. It had been a rough few years. Mom had been injured in a car crash and the resulting litigation had been protracted. Dad’s disability had been cut off and with Mom unable to work, times had been lean. Eventually Dad was reinstated, and Mom’s personal injury suit settled after opening arguments. Mom and Dad then divorced. The adjustment process was proceeding. I was in college. The pressure of life was easing, and we detected a glimmer of sunlight peeking through the clouds. Dad and I felt that things were looking up.
Traditionally, Christmas was held at the ancestral farm. The farm consists of 123 acres of Midwest fields and hardwoods. Most holiday celebrations were held there. A typical celebration involved a lot of food, the gathering of the extended family, stories told, babies held, lots of hugs, and a rabbit hunt or a can shooting session in the back yard. I was comfortable in the bosom of the clan. This Christmas was pretty typical. Dad and I drove home after the gathering full of turkey and a general feeling of warmth. There had not been a lot of outdoor activity because our area had been experiencing a period of arctic cold. Highs were not getting out of the teens. Lows were in the negatives. This is not unheard of in our region, but not the norm either. We were not discouraged. Our house was primarily heated with a wood stove with a couple of small propane units serving as backup. The woodshed was full of seasoned hardwood and we took the precaution of letting water drip from the faucets on really cold nights. The homestead was secure.
It was after dark when Dad and I pulled into the driveway. The headlights illuminated the yard around our pumphouse. It had been transformed into a scene that, on an esthetic level, was quite captivating. A large area around the pump house was covered by a solid sheet of ice. Behind the pump house a small spring of well water bubbled out of the ground. The pump was running full on, valiantly trying to keep the pressure tank full. A brief description of our water system is in order. Our water came from an 85-foot deep well. The water was cold and full of minerals but there was plenty of it and it was wet. The well casing was made of 8-inch pipe. A concrete slab, roughly 10-inches thick, had been poured around the well casing and the pump house built on the slab.
The pumphouse was heavily insulated and kept warm with a single heat lamp. The small building housed the water pump and the pressure tank. An adjustable pressure switch controlled when the pump came on and turned off. When the pressure in the tank dropped the pump would turn on. When the pressure in the tank was restored, the pump would turn off. It was a mostly reliable system. When repairs were needed the local hardware store had replacement parts on the shelf.
What Dad and I faced, as our holiday cheer was swept away by a frigid wind, was a massive leak in a pipe that ran from the pump house to our abode. There was nothing to do but turn off the pump and tackle the problem in the morning. The sun rose after a bitterly cold night. With a sense of grim determination, I gathered my warm clothing and fortitude in the living room next to the wood stove. I dressed for the occasion. Long underwear, heavy socks, jeans, flannel shirt, boots, two pairs of gloves, and insulated coveralls. Dad was similarly attired. To find the exact location of the leak we turned on the pump. A sluggish flow of water in the center of the ice sheet gave us a starting point. I grabbed a shovel from the garage and attempted to dig. The shovel was outclassed by the ice and frozen ground. A 5-foot steel prybar was the next weapon in the arsenal. I made some progress. The bar would sink into the mud at the center of the ice, and I was able to pry out bits of ice and frozen soil. I was not aware of the exact temperature, but the scientific part of my mind noted that mud splashing onto my coveralls and the prybar immediately froze, taking on a dry appearance. I tend to take time to notice the little things during periods of adversity. After chipping a hole about the size of a shovel blade, I had reached the limits with the prybar. Dad and I conferred and decided to try to split out chunks of frozen soil. The 10-pound sledgehammer and 3 steel wedges were retrieved from the woodshed. We soon met with a form of success.
By driving the wedges into the ice near the hole we were able to get cracks to radiate outward into the rock-hard ice and dirt. Other wedges and the prybar could be shoved into the cracks and slabs removed, exposing mud. We had gotten below the frozen dirt. Turing on the pump again showed that the leak was somewhere under the concrete slab. After digging down waist deep, the operation went from digging to tunneling. Dad put straw bales around my hole. Once I was deep enough to get out of the wind, things improved a lot. Loose straw was placed in the bottom of the hole and a heat lamp hung from an extension cord. Darkness fell and we called it a day, retiring to our waterless residence.
The next morning, I resumed my excavations. I continued tunneling under the concrete by kneeling on the dry straw and using a grub hoe with the handle shortened to about 18-inches. At below ground level things weren’t half bad. The heat lamp kept the temperature above freezing and I made steady progress. To keep up morale I hummed the theme song from The Great Escape.
About 3 or 4 feet under the slab I located the water pipe. Once the pipe was exposed the pump was turned on briefly. The leak was immediately located. A 90-degree pipe fitting, called an elbow, had rusted through. Digging further along the pipe toward the house I located another fitting called a union. Some long dead worker had spent the time and money to put the pipe in correctly. His foresight in anticipating that the pipe might need to be changed at some distant point brought tears to my eyes. He even used thread compound on the fittings.
Once the pipe and union were excavated, it took only minutes to unscrew the rusted elbow. A replacement elbow cost less than a dollar at the local hardware store.
Re-entering my tunnel, it was a simple matter to screw the replacement part on, after applying plenty of thread compound. The pump was turned on and no leaks were found. The hole was filled, and the tools put away. Once inside the house I began to peel away the layers of clothing that had stood between me and the cold. I was relieved to find that I was still inside my layers.
It is often stated that simple pleasures are the best. I have never been one for showy extravagance. I am a simple creature with simple tastes. I will state unequivocally that the hot bath I took the evening after the leak was fixed was, to me, as good as anything ancient Rome could have offered. Call me a hedonistic sensualist if you want, but I was a clean warm one.