The well ran dry two months ago. Fourteen feet down there’s six inches of water and the pump is exposed. The pond dropped three feet. Rain every two weeks in the rain shadow of the White Mountains of New Hampshire doesn’t add up to much.
You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
You don’t know what you don’t have until you need it.
Paper plates and towels. Plastic cups. Baby wipes.
What if it doesn’t rain before the ground freezes? No plan for that. Next year we’ll collect rainwater! You can dig an artesian well for seventy dollars a foot, drop rate of $30,000 for 160 feet, but could be more—200, 350, 497 feet!
No government, not local, regional or provincial. No agency. You’re on your own, they told us.
Good neighbours. Guy brought four thousand litres of water. Odile opened her home for laundry and shower.
Commiserations at the spring on Rang Dix with others: a friendly libertarian who advised us to tell no one because the oligarchs will privatize it; a combative old man with one tooth, been here fifty years; a mother with three children in tow, en tabarnak, driving sixty kilometres to Sherbrooke to do laundry; a widow filling old maple sugar jugs; an airplane pilot with a tractor, pulling a thousand-litre “tote”; and me, a little old man with plastic jugs.
Meanwhile, back in the Metropole, the drought finally makes the news—yachts are beached. This inconvenience apart, drought means nice weather on weekends! And us, staring at water coming out of a tap at the community centre, sensing its smoothness. Scratching an unshaven cheek.
We’re ex-campers. We can do this! At least we have a roof over our heads instead of a tent. Others have it worse, much worse. Soldier on.
Like the pandemic, you will never forget this. Changing habits, changing perceptions, appreciating what you don’t have and what you do.
And then the autumn rain finally came. For three days it’s rained. There’s three feet in the well and rising. Simon activated the water pressure tank low pressure switch. And the water flowed from the tap! Exclamations of joy and relief! And a sigh, a deep one, and then another one.
Kenneth Cameron
Chartierville