Yet another Unpleasant Domestic Surprise

Sometime around year before last, I was grubbing up bamboo runners in the back yard (for about the 41,209,746th time) when I hit something metallic-sounding a few inches below ground level and every fourth or fifth stroke I’d catch the blade of the grubbing hoe under something that didn’t give in the way a tree root would.  There’s nothing surprising about that; as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, our yard is a mish-mosh of unmarked and abandoned utilities and improvements.  If it’s not the chopped-off fenceposts, it’s the buried ashlar limestone sills, and if it isn’t that, it’s something else, so I didn’t think anything in particular of the noise.  If I let myself worry about every little clink, I’d never get anything done.

Or I didn’t worry until several days later, when a wet spot began to come up in the back yard right where I’d been digging.  It came and went some, so I thought I might have hit the sewer outfall from the now-demolished garage and mother-in-law apartment on the back corner of the lot, and that it overflowed when it rained enough to fill up the line.  So, because I didn’t have any money to be calling plumbers out, I just let it be.  About the worst it could do would be to water the pecan tree and the privet bush near which it came up.

However, the boggy spot gradually got worse, and quit going away, even in the dryest weather, and I realized I must really have hit some kind of water line, but I still didn’t have any money to call a plumber, so I let it be for months more.  Last week, though, I looked out there and realized I had a big bog developing, and if I really had a water leak I was now losing a lot of water—which might explain why the utility bills have been bigger than they used to be.

So tonight I forced myself to get out spades, and L and I went out and began to dig at the place where the water seemed to be coming from.  The spades quickly hit something metallic-sounding, so I began to dig more carefully and found that what I’d hit was not only the sewage outfall for the mother-in-law, it was the hot and cold water supply pipes that ran on either side of it!  A few more small scoops of earth, and a spray of water jetted up into the air far enough to squirt me in the face and spatter my glasses.  Water, and water under pressure.  I pulled the water meter key out of the shed, went down to the meter, turned it off, then turned on a sillcock to bleed off the system pressure.  Sure enough, my do-it-yourself fountain went away too.

That was an answer which, while I expected it, I didn’t want.  I’ve leaked several thousand gallons of water over the last two years, and it’s no wonder the water-and-light bills don’t go down in the winter any more.  I shoveled some dirt back over the leak to contain the spray, came back in, and started looking up the plumber’s phone number.

I don’t suppose the plumber can get out tomorrow, so I’ll have to make an appointment (for Wednesday, I hope) and then stay home from work to meet him.  I have no idea what can be done about the problem; I doubt I’ll ever want that particular line again, so if he has to cut and cap it I won’t much mind.  I’m going to be looking for the least-cost option to get the leak stopped, ’cos I sure don’t have money to pay the man.

Rudyard Kipling procreates an undifferentiated cable under the smoke grenade.  Fnord.