The water in the pipes...nostalgia and poverty in lower Alabama

(12:07:56 CDT)

The water in the pipes...nostalgia and poverty in lower Alabama

I woke up yesterday and found my pipes doing that whole thudding thing they do whenever the water has been turned off and some air has been allowed to build up: when you turn on the faucet and the whole thing jerks and spews and the water pressure takes a few moments to normalize. And all the pipes are the same way, of course. Once you flush the commode, the whole thing goes Ba-RUM before filling, but then you step into the shower and get a ka-russh-a-GA before it straightens out. The first time it happens, it kind of scares you, like your toilet is about to explode. After you realize what has occurred, you get in the habit of running every water faucet a few seconds before "engaging" the water.

Thinking about yesterday's water noises brought me, the long way around, to the taste of iron in water. More specifically, the way that city-water, as we used to call it down South, lacks that taste. A few of you know that I grew up without an indoor bathroom. It is not that we did not have internal plumbing, we just had a single pipe, which ran to a sink that was ostensibly our "kitchen" sink, but was really the way we got water to anything in the house. Baths were a pot filled with water, heated on the stove, and then added to a small tub with soap. Yep, heated on the stove. We did not have a water heater, either. I suppose there was no room for one. As a kid, you could manage a bath in the tub. As you grew older and larger, the bath became more a rag-and-sponge operation, with the tub just there as water-bearer.

I do not know the mechanics of the thing, but this was somewhat due to our house being built too small to house a bathroom [see above comment about no room for water-heater]. The original design had only four, kind of small, rooms: two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. And, the lack of water throughout the house, I think, also had something do with water pressure from our well. There was no "city water" out where we lived. No pipes brought water to us. We had to get our water from a well in our front yard. No doubt, fifty-years previous, it might have been an actual well. In the 70s, though, it was a well with pump and filter attached and it brought said single line of water to our kitchen sink, where we doled out water to the rest of the house. The phone we had when I was younger was also a party-line, if you want to assign an era to my youth.

It was less than ideal. Droughts were a real problem. Trash could easily wash into the well during certain events. We would service it ourselves. And our bathroom duties were partially handled by tub, partially by a mixture of chamber pot and outhouse. Outhouses, by the way, are tolerable only in the Spring in Fall. In the Summer, they are stench filled maggot farms that collect dust and sweat. In the Winter, they are cold. Even in the more temperate months, you have to perch on this wooden hole above the smell of previous visits. Still, outhouses are not a new technology, and there are ways to lessen all of their hardships. There are not as bad as they might seem if you have never used one, but they are never civilized. Not in the way that clean ceramic and a tiled room can be.

Perhaps the strongest, persistent memory of the whole event was the taste of iron in the water. Our pipes, surely not iron which would rust but some iron alloy, would impart flavor to the water: a faint metallic hint. I don't remember the taste of limestone in the water, nor even the taste of mud or such, but I remember the cold bite of iron in the back of the throat as you drank a glass of iced water on a hot day. It is a flavor that I still associate with water, now twenty-years later, and am often disappointed to never find.

About the time I was eleven or twelve or thirteen—either my tweens or early teens—my dad built an extension to the house and we got municipal water lines dug in our neighborhood. This means we got a bathroom and we got chloro-floro water. Nothing like the taste of industrial poisons to make you think "refreshing", huh? I got my first shower about this time. We knocked down our outhouse and filled in the hole (there's one for future archaeologists). We installed a water heater, too. While there was plenty of room for improvement, we were one step more civilized.

I was a kid, though, a swamp-rat who spent most of his days playing in the woods and running around barefoot. I do not know if I missed the "girls are icky" seminar or if the local girls were so un-girly that their ickiness was never self-evident, but I was interested in girls since about age 7, I guess. I just wasn't so interested in girls that a bath made sense. About the time my hormones turned on, we were upgrading to include a shower. What it must have been like for my brother Danny, I don't know. Or David or Donna. Teen-age years are stinky years, filled with the want to date and look good and smell good and to be around others who do the same. That had to be rough and I feel bad for them. Especially since, circa '77, about my birth, they had moved down from a house in Ohio where they had had proper plumbing and central air (as a note, I did not get central air, outside of a classroom or staying over and other people's houses, until I moved to Huntsville in 1998).

A fears back, up in White Oaks, TN, I was talking to a woman who had grown up in California in kind of a nice place, before moving (for reasons unknown to me) to White Oaks, which is now a somewhat dying, rural town where poverty and isolation adds up quickly to leave people stranded in decaying houses and no jobs. I wonder about the idea of living in a place with local shops and late-night cafes and all that, only to go to a place that not only shuts down at sundown but is barely active at the next sun-up. To date, my life had largely been an improvement in convenience. This is not always the progression of things for other people.

If I have the ability, one day, to have my own well I think I will do it in conjunction with municipal water. And, I will use copper-steel pipes to get the taste of iron, back. I miss it. I really do...

Si Vales, Valeo

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