Our Idyll.

Yesterday, at 5-something in the morning, we lost power. The previous evening, there’d been a huge, quick thunderstorm with a sudden blast of rain that blew in, horizontally, with no warning, and pelted me in the face where I was sitting on the front porch well under the eaves, so we were only one house of thousands up here without electricity in the morning. Our house has solar panels on the roof that supply most of our electricity, and batteries that store about two days worth of power to get us through outages, which we are told are not infrequent here.

We also lost phone and internet service. This house is in a dead zone as far as cell service, but the previous owners, who have a media business and depended on staying connected, rigged the place somehow to get reception. As Chan just said when I asked him, “there’s a machine up there that they left and the ADT guy connected it when he was here. I don’t know what it is or how it works.” The improved phone signal is somehow connected to the improved internet signal. Or maybe vice versa. It’s somewhat of a chicken and egg mystery, but it works so we don’t ask.

The point is that we were off the grid. Off all the grids at once. Oh, and also I couldn’t do laundry. Apparently the batteries don’t store enough electricity to run the dryer? Or maybe the dryer is connected to the internet. I literally would not be at all surprised.

So, and just then … our hot water heater began emptying its contents onto our basement floor, for how long before we realized it we have no idea. I went looking for a nail because I wanted to pound a small pilot hole at the bottom of a bathroom door so I could screw in a doorstop, and then I was going to use the nail to hang a picture. Nails are in the basement. Normally our basement is cool and dry, even when it’s roasting outside, and it was pretty mild yesterday, so I knew something was terribly wrong when I opened to door to the stairs and felt a gust of warm, wet air. I went down and followed a trail of increasingly larger puddles, steam, and condensation dripping from everything, to the back of the basement where there was about 2 inches of water on the floor, and saw hot water gushing out of the bottom of the hot water heater from a copper pipe. The pipe originated from the top of the heater, went up, then over and down the side, straight down to about 3 inches from the floor where the water was coming out.

The next two hours: Chan driving until he had a strong enough signal to call somebody. Me catching the water in a bucket and running out to the backyard to dump it. I’d guess about 50 trips before Chan got home. He wasn’t able to reach a plumber.

In the name of just trying things hoping something will work, Chan turned the temp on the water heater down all the way; I suggested turning the hot water on full blast on all the taps, just to empty the water heater. Those actions in tandem slowed the discharge of water and little by little stopped it completely.

The power came back on last night, so at least we don’t have to drive 20 miles to make phone calls. Now we’re without hot water until we can find a plumber to come tell us what’s wrong and hand us an invoice with a very large number on it.

This place has a powerful magic. Later, realizing there was nothing more we could do till morning, we had a cocktail on the front porch, with the rain (coming down more appropriately vertically by that time), and the musty-sweet smell, and felt insanely content and lucky for it.