This is a Test

As soon as I caught sight of the house in the truck’s headlights, I knew something was wrong. Dark, empty, and imposing on this moonlit February night, the house had an unexpected silvery ribbon outlining its foundation. I parked with the headlights shining on the house, and walked over to have a look. A glistening row of icicles, like a rhinestone belt, encircled the entire first floor of the house—a house that my wife, Jeanetta, and I had bought earlier that day.

When I put my ear to the kitchen door, I could hear water raining down from the second floor. I hiked around back to the walkout-basement door. The water was escaping around its threshold and turning into a sheet of ice as it headed downhill on this 15°F Connecticut night.

We had just signed the papers for this house, but we didn’t have a key yet. This was the pre-cell-phone era, so I headed down to the local gas station to give our real-estate agent a call on the pay phone.

“Irene, I think we’ve got a leaking-pipe problem over at the house.”

“I’ll be right there,” she said. But first, as is the custom in this semirural part of Connecticut when you’ve got a major plumbing problem in a vacant house, she called the fire department.

By the time I got back to the house, there were fire trucks, vans, and other assorted rescue vehicles parked all over the yard. Their engines idled in unison, and their spinning red, white, and blue emergency strobes lit up the leafless forest like a giant campfire. Cars slowed down and stopped on the nearby road. Neighbors wandered down the driveway, wondering what was going on.

As we would soon find out, the furnace had failed to reignite after a power outage. When it fell below freezing in the house, the copper water lines ruptured in 14 places (almost all of them upstairs). A brief warm spell melted the ice in the broken pipes, and then the well pump went to town. It had been flooding the house for two days by the time I happened upon it.

Irene got there just about the same time that my wife stopped by on her way home from work. She hadn’t planned to stop, but she was real curious when she saw the gathering in her just-bought yard. Irene unlocked the door, and the three of us walked in and turned on a light. Water was rushing down the center-hall stairway like an alpine creek cascading through a little gorge. Curtains of droplets came down through the gaps in the tongue-and-groove ceiling boards. The wall-to-wall carpet on the first floor amounted to an 800-sq.-ft. sponge at full capacity. Water found its way between the drywall and the acrylic paint, creating strange balloonlike sacks of water that hung from the walls. You could practically hear the kitchen’s particleboard cabinets swelling in place.

The firefighters headed for the basement to shut off the well and to start pumping out the lake down there. A giant hose snaked through the front door, turned the corner at the kitchen, and ran down the basement stairs.

My wife looked around the entry, assessing the havoc wreaked by two days of water run amok in her house. She looked over at me and, with a twinkle in her eye, said, “Boy, it’s got a good well, doesn’t it?” God bless her.