Camp shower.
I like camp. And camping. All of it.
The flannel shirts and rehydrated backpacker’s meals and Swiss Miss mixed with Nescafe in enamel mugs all surrounded by a mist of bug spray and campfire smoke.
When I was a young girl growing up in Minnesota, I went to no less than three camps each summer: an environmental learning center, a rustic camp on the shores of Lake Superior, and a less-rustic-and-more-campy camp on a really big lake.
Those first two? Came with plenty of roughin’ it. I’m good at it. I can pee in the woods, set a tent up in the dark, make water potable, and start a fire if I really have to. I also make a hella mean s’more. Like I said: good at it.
But it’s one thing if I’m choosing to rough it. And another thing entirely if it’s foisted upon me when I’m least expecting it.
***
I knew something was up this morning when I walked downstairs and heard the pump going long after it should have following my morning flush. And quite a bit louder than normal too. But I didn’t think too much of it until I opened the faucet in the kitchen and heard the disappointing gurgle of a water system trying but failing to do its job.
I looked at the clock, realized there wasn’t much I could do yet at 6:35. So I filled the pot at the potable water dispenser to make coffee before waking Joe to give him the news.
By 7:30 a.m., we had put in a service request to advise Facilities that, for the third time in two-ish months, we were without running water. (Which is different from drinking water which gets delivered twice weekly except on the weeks that they decide to deliver maybe once or maybe not at all.) Joe noted in his service request that we had already checked the cistern and that it was indeed full. (I don’t think he also mentioned that he had pulled a bucket out so that we could “flush” at least one of our toilets).
***
Twelve hours and two separate batches of plumbers having declared the problem fixed!, I lay with my head over the edge of the bathtub while Joe poured water from a half-empty 5 gallon drinking water bottle so that I could at least shampoo my hair after the shower had fizzled out 15 seconds in. (Joe had gotten lucky with his three minute shower before mine but we had both known that we were on borrowed time based on how the pump was sounding.)
***
It would be (really) easy to make this a diatribe of my frustrations with the powers that be for not figuring out how to just get this issue fixed. (Especially after Joe and I graciously and patiently waited through Christmas Day before calling on the 26th so as not to ruin somebody’s holiday the last time this happened.)
But part of me just honestly can’t believe it. (It’d be one thing if we were at a post where our neighbors also didn’t have running water...) And part of me is sick of being frustrated.
So I’m trying to look at things from the glass half full perspective. We had enough drinking water to be able to “splurge” and use some so I could shampoo my hair. The pump didn’t fail again tonight until Kiddo had taken his must-have-totally-part-of-the-nightly-routine bath. Plus Joe got a proper, if a little bit short, shower in after a very long day at work.
Even more than all of those things, I have enough perspective to know that I’m one of the lucky ones: eventually this will get fixed and we’ll have running water again. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, but soon enough. And while not having running water is a rather annoying inconvenience to me, it’s a way of life for a whole lot of people on this planet.
And maybe that’s what the universe is trying to remind me of. Another lesson in humility and gratitude. One drop at a time.
