Archives
19/08: The chamber of moldy spiders
When we arrived home from Italy, all was well with the house, all but a small hole in one of old Iron pipes that wind there way through the basement an crawl spaces of our house. A small drip, drip, drips – falling from the old pipe and into the dirt of the crawl space below. I little thing, but large enough to warrant replacement, and so it began. The pipe sits just below the floor boards of the dining room – a space accessed by scrambling up the cobbled wall of the basement, bending my long body around stone abutments and crawling through the small dark space about three feet high. All of this would be a pleasant little obstacle course – a cool refuge from the suns hot rays on a summer day – if not for the dripping pipes, the stubborn plumbing and…. the moldy spiders.These spiders are a grim reminder of the cycle of life, and the adaptation of species to their environment. Generation after generation of spiders have been born and procreated in dark recesses of our basement – and this particular breed is a thin legged small bodied variety that spin their webs and wait, and wait, and wait for something to wander there way. And they appear to be still waiting, as my flashlight illuminates them, frozen still in time, growing a thin white mold that seems to row thicker at their joints. They are dead, long dead, I remind myself, as their webs cover my head with thin netting and I duck to avoid their dangling bodies.
With grunts and groans that are deadened by the insulation from the rooms upstairs. I remove the leaking pipe, only to find that I have twisted off the end of end of the adjoining pipe in the effort, and so two must be replaced. With only two trips to the hardware store I have the pipes replaced, but a new problem springs up – a strange smell that I attribute to the threading compound I smeared liberally on the ends of the pipe. “No worries” – I assure Tory “the water will eventually wash out the smell.” It doesn’t. So weeks pass and I find myself again laying on my back with two heavy pipe wrenches, my friends the dead spiders, and a cobblestone pillow,
I remove the pipes – and we clean the thoroughly with a brush. In I crawl again. As much as I want to deny it, the smell lingers. And so I set to replacing more of the pipe – now deeper under the house. Inevitably I forget a tool, or plumbers tape (because I’m off the threading compound for obvious reasons) and I have to yell – not just a yelp, but that “calling to the cows that are in the back of the pasture” scream to Tory because I am in the depths of the underground, and my muffled voice easily passes for NPR background noise discussion of the sub-prime mortgage rate problems. I have problems of my own, I don’t want to crawl on my knees any more than I have to - through the dark, and dead spiders, and the mud hole that has now developed in my basement. And so I listen as the padding sound of Tory’s feet come across the floor and down the basement steps. She kindly finds me files, wrenches – and other things and throws them to my feet – all she can see of me in the small space.
I finish late at night – and turn on the heavy old spigot that sends a satisfying rush of water through the new pipes. I am eager to run – to clamber up to the kitchen and smell the clear cold water. But it is not to be, for as Tory and the girls are sleeping soundly in their beds, a mighty geyser erupts from behind the upright piano and hits the ceiling, sending water all over the dining room. My banging and twisting the pipes in the cellar had split a copper pipe that appears momentarily in the dining room before making a 90-degree turn into the kitchen wall. I return to the basement, turn off the water, and trudge up to bed.
So today I scrubbed, fluxed, and soldered; I successfully put the pipe together. Turning on the tap it sputtered, spat up rusty brown water, and then ran clean and well. But returning after a few hours the smell remains. On the bright side there are only about five feet of pipe left to replace, and it’s all on the main floor. Sadly, I have to return to the crawl space to retrieve my flashlight.
10/08: A is for aspen –
I arrive home from Utah with a new determination and dedication to my blog, which has sat quietly neglected in a dark corner of the internet. We spent Ten days in Utah, and five or six of those days at Aspen grove, an “Alumni Camp” owned by BYU, tucked up behind MT Timpanogas, just up the road from Sundance. On the Western side of the ridge the spot enjoys a very different climate than the dry expanse on the west. Douglas fir dot the hillside, and the camp itself sits right on the edge of what is claimed to be the largest living organism in the world – an enormous cluster or aspen, cascading down the mountain-side and connected to each other through an ancient interwoven root system.
All of the families stayed in little a-frames, ours was the smallest, and highest if all of them, teetering on the edge of the mountain, propped up to level by cinder blocks cedar shakes overlapping from the spine of the roof, all the way down to the ground. The little houses were painted bright white inside, and I became oddly attached to our little cabin in our time there – enough to make me sad to hear that this was the last year for the little buildings, they would soon surrender to the bulldozer as an enormous lodge rose further up the canyon, ready to take over.
Deer continually walked by the cabins, and we saw moose – chewing on the slimey green algae that grew in the trout pond. Aside from the ever-present wildlife the experiencing was an odd one, as it pulled me back into the culture of BYU, so long ago left, the similarities of Aspen grove to BYU were startling, from regulations, to food, to devotionals, that it continually made it seem as if I were living through a flash back. The experience of Aspen grove was a good one, we spent time playing shuffle board, swimming, eve trying the low ropes course.
Now we are home, and the new school year looms heavy on the horizon.