Perhaps the worst part of the homestead’s water system freezing up is not the inconvenience, but the uncertainty.
We are a family of speculators. We can’t help but speculate on things: what people will say, how they’ll react, what’s happening, what did happen, what will happen . . . . We do it often enough that it can cause problems. We actually chide ourselves and each other for speculating rather than investigating.
Unfortunately, our water system encourages speculation, as investigation requires radical acts, such as digging up an entire water line. As that may be physically impossible when it comes to frozen pipes (requiring digging through frozen ground to reach those pipes) we can do little else.
Not only that, but we don’t know, precisely, where the water line is. We have a hand drawn map that indicates the general area where it runs, but finding it, even in better conditions than these, is quite difficult.
Aly harvests ice from seeps to augment our water supply during the freeze-up (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
