Things went along like that for several years. Again we thought we were doing such a good job using water wisely. Then we got to go to the next level. One day I was doing dishes when there was a drop in water pressure. From past experience, I knew that this meant the pump was not pumping water into the house. Bill went to investigate and what he found was a flood! The underground room was knee deep in water! That meant the tank had sprung a leak. It was December 30 and cold, but thankfully, not as cold as it could have been! He called a rental place to try and rent a pump. He explained the situation and the guy took pity on him, I guess. He said they don’t usually rent out pumps in the winter because people bring them back frozen, but since technically we would not be using it outside, he would make an exception. By the time we got the pump home and started pumping, it was 3 p.m. We finished at midnight. By the time the water was pumped out of the room, there was still some left in the tank, so I filled as many containers as I could find to get us through the next few days. This began the next stage in our water adventure!
The next day we returned the pump and then went to buy some water containers. We found seven, six, and five gallon jugs. Then we went to find the spring that we had heard people talking about. We discovered that we had driven by it without knowing what it was on several occasions.
We pulled up, parked and brought our jugs up to the spigots. There were two of them on a little platform over the spring. We pressed a metal button and water came out of the spigot—sometimes fast and sometimes slow—it depended on the water level and whether both spigots were in use. Once it was full, I went to pick up the six-gallon jug and almost fell down! It was so heavy! I had no idea water weighed so much! And, to make matters worse, the place was a sheet of ice—all uneven and bumpy, with no traction at all. Under the spigots was a metal grate so ice wouldn’t build up so fast, but around that was like this hill of ice and you had to kind of brace yourself against that to get the water. It was always a nerve-wracking time, trying to get those full containers back to the truck. And if people came up after you, instead of waiting by their vehicles, they had to line up their containers right behind you, so there was no room to move. I grew to hate going there. The water was really good, but the experience was tedious—at least in the winter.
The metal button was cold, though someone showed us how to shove a penny in there to keep it depressed—that was good for my frozen fingers! It was icy and sometimes crowded, and people were inconsiderate. It was treacherous to try to get from the truck to the water and back to the truck. And in order to beat the crowds, we got up very early on Sunday morning to get there. It took an hour altogether from the time we left to the time we got back. If, for some reason, we used more water than usual, we had to make an extra trip. We were very careful with water. We heated a kettle of water for dishes and for “showers.” We learned to wash with even less water. We used about a gallon to “shower.” It took a long time to do things now that you had to wait for the water to heat up. Instead of jumping in the shower, we had to heat up the water and mix it with colder water to get the right temperature. Then we had to be very careful once we were in there washing up, because once that hot water was gone, there wasn’t any more. To do dishes we filled a dishpan with hot water washed them all, then rinsed from the beverage cooler thing we had on the counter by the sink. It had a little spigot, and that served as our “running water” for the sink. Cooking changed because we never wanted to produce large amounts of dirty dishes—they were a pain to clean. For a while, I even was doing the laundry by hand. That was quite something in the winter—hanging dripping wet clothes outside on the clothesline and watching them steam until they froze, leaving icicles hanging from them.
