Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Drop... Oh WHATEVER!

Ah, the joys of rural living. Fresh air, sunshine, peace and quiet. Well, one out of three ain't bad I suppose. That being the fresh air. This is, after all, OREGON IN WINTER. So while those at higher elevations or more northerly latitudes are enjoying the snowfall, we are DROWNING in the Willamette Valley, people. Literally.

So a couple days ago, my husband and I took a drive up toward Silver Falls in the evening to see the snowfall. He and Kate had driven that way two hours earlier and had to turn back because it wasn't plowed and pretty deep. I thought surely it was plowed by then. So up we went. ABout 500 feet higher than where I live there is a magic line where the white starts. It is that clear cut a demarcation. It had been precipitating for a couple days, reports of winter storms abounding in the Pacific NW, and that anticipatory excitement of maybe getting snowed in for a day was making itself felt all around. But by then, it was pouring rain at our elevation.

We reached the usual snowline, and while it was still raining and my car said 38 degrees, there was over a foot deep slush on the road, and only our side was plowed. So far so good. About 500 more feet of elevation changed things a lot. It was now over a foot of snow on the road, and neither side was plowed. And it was dark. And my trusty little all-wheel-drive Subaru was starting to struggle a little. A little further on and it became clear we had to turn around, which was easier said than done. Thankfully we WERE in the Subaru and not Bubba, so we could just turn around in the middle of the road, which was still tricky given the propensity to go some other direction than the one you intended in all the mooshy snow.

So that was night before last. What a difference 24 hours makes. Like about 15 degrees warmer and monsoon season. It was like the 40 days and 40 nights around here, and I was beginning to wish I had an Ark. Naturally it was my day on call. Naturally I got called. Naturally it was the middle of the night, blowing 40 MPH, and pouring rain like all bloody hell. To make it that much more delicious, the phone service was behaving as if I lived in a third world country. The patient I was called about had a distinct problem, I was trying to consult by phone with a specialist in Portland, and got disconnected no less than four times. On both my cell and land lines. So finally I headed into the hospital, only to get to the bottom of my driveway and encounter the LAKE that used to be the lovely little gravel road on which I live. It had been accumulating there when I got home a few hours earlier, but was by then distinctly worse. Like, I had no driveway. Just a drive into a lake, with a dropoff into a culvert lurking in there somewhere on either side. So I backed up, turned around (thank you AWD for getting me through the mud in a circle) and went back for Bubba. More ground clearance seemed like a profoundly good idea.

The water was up to my wheelwells. I got through, but nervously due to some horrific reports earlier in the evening of cars being sucked into culverts and disappearing. I decided to stay the night at the hospital and tackle the return trip in the daylight. I was reeeaaaallllly looking forward to a relaxing day off. Well, forget that. As I was on my way home, Kate called. You know you really do not want to have a conversation that begins "I just thought I ought to let you know this before you got home", or "We have a bit of a situation here", and you know damn well you don't want a conversation that begins with both. Sigh.

The situation was water in the basement. A lot of water. Alllll over the basement. Not good. We had carpet in the basement. And furniture. And a sewing and crafts area with fabrics, paper, paints, all sort of stuff. And a furnace, water heater, and washer and dryer. With electricity. ELECTRICITY. And WATER. Are you getting this??

When I got home and went down there, there was a lot of noise. Not a good noise. A noise like a small waterfall. It WAS a small waterfall, coming right through the wall of my basement and splashing on the floor, or onto the lake that used to be the floor. About 7 discrete leaks on one wall and one on the adjacent wall of the corner behind my utility sink and water heater. Where I could not get a bucket in. Time to think creatively. So off I ran to the hospital, where they graciously produced an under-butt drape with a pouch and a drain hose, which I planned to affix to the wall and catch the water. Great plan. Didn't work worth anything.

Next plan, hydraulic cement. I followed the instructions to the letter, and this was advertised to "set under water in five minutes" and to work on "active water leaks." Well, apparently not THIS active. Well before the five minutes were up the plug fell apart in my hands and the water began streaming out from under it. Damn.

Enter the world's best next-door neighbors. You CANNOT SURVIVE in the country without neighbors. Preferably neighbors who know a great deal more than you do about almost everything, are full of applied skills, and willing to employ them on your behalf. In this case, it was two trucks, three guys, shovels and picks, and in the blink of an eye a trench around my house draining an impressive quantity of water away from the house and into the driveway.

While we are not yet dry here, the waterfall is no longer shooting out from the wall at a 90 degree angle, and is approaching a dribble as we speak. Yes, we will have a rather nasty cleanup, and it IS supposed to rain for the next week. So there may be some more joy and rapture in our immediate future.

But I am not ready to abandon ship. I have a sump pump, borrowed from one of my partners (which is a whole nuther story as they say - how is it that men just inherently know how to drag out a gas powered thing that has sat fallow for 20 years, take things off and put things on, checking spark plugs for sparking and carburetors and chokes and all those things and magically making it start? Thankfully he was willing to do this on his lunch hour), I have a large tub of hydraulic cement which might work a lot better when it isn't fighting Little Niagara, and I am armed with the attitude that this is life on the farm. Sometimes crap is coming your way. Get a shovel.