I recently ran into a cascading series of personal failings that reminded me of the old kid’s story, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Except that my story was the adult version with swearing and whole lot more disappointment and depression.
One morning I was standing in the driveway, staring at a puddle of water bubbling up out of the ground about five feet away from me. Out of curiosity, I grabbed a shovel and started to dig. I suspected there was a cracked pipe among my watering lines, and I hoped that after a few minutes of digging I would find the problem.
I did not find a cracked water line. I didn’t find any pipe at all. Instead, what I discovered was a trickle of water flowing underground and leading back toward the driveway. I chased the trickle for about three feet before I realized that the leak I was searching for was actually UNDER the driveway. I gave up, realizing that this was going to be much too large of a project to do on my own.
Going against every instinct I have as a man and as a husband, I called a plumber.
The plumber was out the next day, which was nice. He couldn’t find the leak, which was not so nice. He (let’s call him, Jeff) billed me $200 and then handed me a business card with someone else’s name on it.
He said, “This guy is really good at finding leaks. He’ll be able to find it, no problem. Have a nice day.”
With no other recourse, I called the number on the card. The new guy (We’ll call him, John), came out three days later. He parked his truck on my driveway, then took out some scientific looking equipment that I guessed was once used to find German submarines during World War II. With a set of headphones and a stick, he walked around my driveway for about an hour like a geriatric treasure hunter combing the beach with a metal detector.
“Aha!” said John. Then he pulled out a can of spray paint and painted a square on my driveway. “The leak is somewhere in this area.”
“Can you fix it?” I asked him.
“Oh, I don’t fix leaks. I just find them. You’ll need to call Jeff back to dig it up and fix it. That will be 250 dollars, please.”
Two days later, Jeff was back. My driveway is paved with gravel rather than concrete or asphalt, so digging wasn’t as difficult as it could have been. Still, it took Jeff two more days to find the leaking pipes and dig a large enough hole to have room to fix them. The pipes turned out to be four feet under ground rather than the traditional 18 inches in most homes. I don’t know why the original builder felt he had to go so deep. Maybe he was burying a dead body and decided, “while I’m down here, let’s put in some plumbing.”
Regardless of the reason for the ridiculous depths, Jeff was able to fix the damaged pipes. He dumped the mud back into the hole he had made, put away his tools and charged me an additional $1300. He then told me that repairing the driveway was not part of his job and walked away, leaving me with a four feet wide, four feet deep, mud puddle.
The hole still had so much water in it that the ground was more like quicksand than dirt. I stepped on it to pack it down and was almost pulled in. If I had been foolish enough to put my full weight on it, I would have disappeared without a trace, and my wife would currently be vacationing in Tahiti with the insurance money. When I told my wife what happened, she had an odd wistful look on her face. I think she might be a little disappointed I escaped.
I decided I needed to add more dirt to the hole to dry out the ground before putting new rock down over it. As it was, any car driving over that hole was going to lose a tire. I live on a five-acre piece of property, so finding dirt is not a problem. I grabbed a shovel and my wheelbarrow out of the garage.
Unfortunately, I have not used my wheelbarrow in quite a while, and I discovered that the rubber wheel had gone flat and rotted. It would not reinflate when I tried putting in air. So, instead of filling in the hole in my driveway, I put away the shovel and drove to the hardware store to buy a new wheel for the wheelless barrow.
As I sit here at the computer writing this blog post, there is still a large mud puddle in the middle of my driveway. In addition, I have also discovered a new irrigation pipe that has cracked and needs to be repaired or replaced. I can’t afford to call Jeff back to fix it, so I have decided that I can live with the new puddle for a while.
Just to add some fun new twists to my life, during this whole ordeal we had a brief power outage. We were only in the dark for about 30 minutes, but when the power came back on, our internet and house phone both stopped working. They are still out, and we are waiting (not so patiently) for the internet company technician to come out next week to fix it.
2021 is not starting out so great for the Wilbanks family. I’m trying to find the silver lining in all of this, but all I can come up with so far is I have a new wheel on my wheelbarrow. It isn’t much, but it’s what I’m clinging to at the moment.
I’m going to go pour myself a drink now, then go outside and stare at my shiny new wheel until I stop thinking about burning down the house and moving to a new place. Preferably one with no running water.
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