Don attacked the problem of providing us with water through the winter with ingenuity and energy, piping together old hot water heaters (collected from the condos where we'd lived in Portland) into holding tanks for water pumped up from the lake 300 feet down the hill. The result isn't pretty, but it works beautifully. Or at least it did until Don was out of commission with his knee, and he left it in my hands. I managed to destroy our pump by freezing and cracking.
In the picture to the right, I get a pre-op lesson from Don on how to fill the tanks. The picture bottom center is from the summer, when we realigned the pipes to make sure they had no flat spots that could be a breeding place for ice. (We had a pretty good freeze-up in early 2009 that required every ounce of Don's brain power to work around.) On the bottom right is the jetty that Don built to give us access farther out into the lake. Once the ice freezes, it's fairly simple to walk out on the ice and dig a hole, but the shoulder seasons with soft ice require a little more creativity.
Here, Sven (Don) displays to me (Olga) the various tools at our disposal for boring through the ice. Sven tried several techniques, including keeping a hole open all winter using the heating element from a hot water heater, which did work. This year, since the task falls to Olga, Sven decided she could simply chop a hole in the ice with an ax. Such fun.
Sven's had quite a change in attitude. Early on he was very nervous about keeping a hole in the ice open and wanted to place a contraption of wood and Styrofoam in the ice as it froze so we'd have access. So, just as the lake was freezing over, we attempted to use our aluminum canoe as an ice breaker to get far enough out in the water. It didn't work. Sven and Olga were very cold and wet that day.
Here I am at my lesson again. The little pump on the end of the jetty we used to use to prime the big pump. But after I killed that one, we actually managed to top off the tanks with the baby, although it took hours. If it had been warm outside, the pump would have overheated, but fortunately that wasn't a problem!
ONE-BUCKET SHOWERS
and other water-saving concepts
For many people, our water conservation is unimaginable. Our tanks hold a mere 200 gallons, which often last a month. We achieve this remarkable feat by:
• Using a one-gallon-per-minute shower head, which actually provides a quite nice shower
• Collecting the water from a five-minute shower in a five-gallon bucket and recycling the water for flushing the toilet
• Reusing nearly every other drop of water, including that from dishwashing and even washing our hands and brushing our teeth
Once you get used to saving water, it becomes second nature, but the mindfulness is always there. Every day I think about the roughly one billion people in the world for whom finding adequate water is a life-threatening daily struggle.
