Pipeline Postscripts

A.V. Walters

I lived in California for thirty-five years. Rick lived there all his life. It is in our blood to be water-thrifty. Conservation is a lifestyle issue—not to flush every time, short showers, dozens of little tricks learned over time to save water. That is not the culture in Michigan. Doing dishes, my brother doesn’t think twice of letting the water run, while a conversation or other task takes him away from the sink. Watching, I squirm. Here people have lawns, and they water them, with sprinklers.

With our uber-winter this year, many have had their pipes freeze. There are four communities in Upper Michigan where the entire towns are at risk of freezing pipes. (Our water temperature at the tap is 36 degrees.) In L’Anse, Michigan, the townsfolk are being advised to let their faucets run—constantly, to keep the mains from freezing solid. Some developments were built with plastic supply lines. Plastic won’t conduct electricity. If your plastic lines freeze you’re in trouble. The advice there is to cross your fingers and move out until Spring. (You’re crossing your fingers in hopes that the pipes themselves won’t burst, leaving you with an even worse mess when the thaw comes.) The utility wonks in L’Anse are telling people not to shovel the snow away from over their water lines. (Too late for us, eh?) It’s often a surprise to people from milder climates that a good layer of snow actually insulates from the more extreme cold.

Now that the welders have zapped our lines clear, we’ve been told to leave the tap running, all the time, until Spring. Our water-miser ways may have even contributed to the freeze in the first place. We’re struggling with what feels to Californians like water waste. My natural inclination is to shut off the tap—always. Now we can’t and I’m having trouble with that adjustment. You can hear the water run. You wake up at night, foggy-brained, thinking that you need to get up—someone has left the tap running.

I’m trying to adjust my attitude for the duration. Think of it as a water feature, I tell myself, you know, like a fountain. That’s the ticket. Don’t folks use water sounds for relaxation? I try to reconcile my discomfort with rationalization. After all, this water comes from Lake Michigan. I’m just recycling it—through the house septic, through the sandy soils of Empire and then back to the Lake. In the meantime, as a renter, I’m glad I don’t pay the water bill.