Shawn Vestal: A little bad luck, and a flood of good

It was one day of waterless misery, two minutes of fleeting joy and an hour of soggy panic, followed by an exhilarating rescue by the heroes of the city water department and our plumber.

What luck.

What incredible good fortune came flooding in with the bad.

Like hundreds of others around the region, our pipes froze during the recent deep cold. Once we managed to unfreeze them, a cracked meter sprayed water into the basement as we hopped around and moved furniture and dragooned every towel and old blanket in the house into a futile attempt to soak up the problem.

Thanks to a lot of help from competent others, the crisis was short-lived.

Our adventure pales in comparison with the troubles of some, and it’s nothing at all compared to the suffering of those with nowhere to live. For those folks, the new mayor rapidly assembled an emergency warming plan that was serious and smart and humane – qualities as welcome coming from the big office at City Hall as warm water flowing through a newly thawed pipe.

Still, recent life at our house was hour upon hour of feeling unlucky, put-upon, and abused by fate, only to recognize that the opposite is true.

Your good luck is never so evident as when your luck is bad.

Nothing highlights our deep reliance on one another like severe winter weather. Nothing so exposes our fundamental interdependency and the necessity of helping those who need it – from the smallest acts of neighborliness, such as shoveling a walk or helping to push a car out of a berm, to home emergencies in which the professionals are called in.

A crisis of ice and snow always calls to mind the famous quotation from Wallace Stegner about the myth of Western individualism: “One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”

The recent deep freeze seized pipes in homes all across the region. Hundreds of homeowners reported frozen or burst pipes during the recent subzero plunge, and plumbers could not keep up. In our case, we were out of town, visiting family, when we were alerted by a friend of our son’s who was looking after the place that no water would come from the faucets.

We were a thousand miles away.

That was Sunday. We returned Monday to our 117-year-old home – perhaps the least efficient single housing unit in the native home of hope – to find the situation essentially unchanged. We couldn’t tell where the ice blockage was, with so many pipes behind walls and under floors, but with the advice of our long-term plumber – an excellent and mostly retired professional who shall remain nameless – we set to work attempting to thaw the pipes, using space heaters.

Our plumber has pulled our fat from the fire roughly a million times in the past 20 years, and given the crazy-quilt nature of the home’s plumbing – ranging from the oldest galvanized steel pipes to all the good new stuff he’s put in, one crisis at a time – he prepared us for the worst.

I had assumed that when we returned to find no obvious burst pipes or leaks, that was a good sign. He set me straight. The real problems – and it was not unlikely that they’d be serious and widespread – would appear when the pipes thawed.

So we set up the space heaters here and there, blasted heat at the walls and pipes, left the faucets open, and checked them every two seconds.

Monday came and went. Tuesday was more of the same until early afternoon, when the first thin trickle emerged from a downstairs sink. At the same moment – accompanied by a rumbling through the pipes – my wife called from upstairs: The water was on!

In the kitchen and in the bathroom. The hot and the cold. The pressure was good, the toilets were filling, and we could not see any sign of trouble.

For a few brief seconds, the most unlikely best-case scenario seemed to have arrived.

Then I spotted the dripping from the bottom of the water meter. Then a thin misty spray sprung free. Then another.

Then it was just water spritzing everywhere. And the leak was on the street side of the shut-off valve, so there was no stopping it.

I don’t need to belabor all that came next, except to say that if I’ve never sung the praises of the City of Spokane water department then I’ve been remiss. Because the problem was in the meter, they needed to come and replace it – and they were at our house less than a half-hour later. Inside of an hour, two teams of workers had shown up, shut off the water at the street and replaced the meter, and hustled off to the next crisis.

Our plumber finished making sure everything was square and before the dinner hour we were showering and drinking from the tap and flushing the toilet and participating in all of the other glories that we had been so briefly denied.

Luckier than many. Luckier than most.

It only took a tiny bit of bad luck to make it obvious.