What It's Like to Have a Pumphouse

Nobody told me anything about this small odd-shaped wooden structure with a midget door except that in deep lengthy cold I'd better put a heater in it. Nobody said what was inside, or what kind of heater. Soon I learned this structure just outside my kitchen door was a pumphouse. I never opened the small door to see the actual pump because bees by the dozens crawled in and out of cracks in the wood as if the pumphouse were a beehive. Eventually ivy grew and twined it shut.

Bit by bit it taught me. It's an electric pump, so outages mean no water. Therefore I keep a few gallons of bottled water, and when storms threaten, I fill pans. Calcium-rich well water will encrust every faucet and etch every glass, and the dishwasher erodes dishes until one day they crack, just like your skin, and it gives all your clothes, not just jeans, a lovely stonewash; and the fix is to add vinegar or clean with vinegar, and buy new glassware when too embarrassed to explain to guests that the glasses are not dirty, just cloudy; and that if you keep drinking from cloudy glassware it'll abrade and split the corners of your lips; and soon I learned I had to filter the drinking water or else be just as stonewashed on my inside. (To install a water softener is too expensive, and the salt would affect the creek.) Wash the car with this water and it'll dull the surface and leave dry white calcium hickeys.

The water tastes fine and fresh to me, but people do remark that it's different from city tap water. Only once did the pump freeze up, the first winter here, '98-'99, for a short time only; good thing because I had no heater for the pumphouse and no place to plug one in. And while hosing down the garden during long droughts it'd pump for ten minutes, dribble, and then quit, such was the local demand on the water table. It taught me (and sometimes I still remember) that I live on a planet. Water direct from the outdoor spigot is so cold it's painful. When people worry about the world's water supply I don't worry.

That said, the pump has never failed, but the pumphouse roof was rotted, so the handyman came and opened its door and tore off the roof to replace it, and for the first time I saw that the pump is a simple gray cylinder about the size of a propane barbecue cylinder. Why such a sizeable pumphouse then? For insulation. Behold a real "pump house" that is not a bar or restaurant.

Learning from Well Water

Before the electric pump draws it up into daylight, the well water here has had a long and mysterious career. Fabulously icy, and stony-sweet, it’s divine -- and as hard as nails. It's taught me this:

1. For calcification around fixtures, spray with 50 percent vinegar, let it sit, wipe like you mean it, and then – wearing eye protection -- use a kitchen knife to chip off what remains.
2. Rinse hair and face with bottled water or rainwater to stave off ratty “stonewashed” hair and ashy skin.
3. A “stonewashed” effect will suffuse all your fabrics eventually. Laundering them inside out will help them last a bit longer.
   
4. Drinking glasses will look like you just drank milk from them unless you use a dishwasher armed with Jet-Dry. Alternately, buy drinking glasses by the case, or explain to your company that the glasses aren’t really dirty, that you honestly did wash them, that the hard water clouds them up. Hard water also wears out glass so that it breaks more easily.
5. Use a filtration pitcher for most of your drinking and cooking. Your coffeepots and pans will last longer. Filter the water you give to pets.
6. In your sink or washtub, detergent will look not sudsy but like scum. The harder the water, the less suds you get. But the detergent is still working. The fact is that sudsing agents are added to detergents and shampoos merely for show. Hard water fights on the side of reality. I find that fantasizing about luxurious lather is almost as good as the real thing.