March 26, 2001

We recently made a modest contribution towards building an indoor pool in the Village and the check must have cleared, because Thursday morning I opened the door to our basement and there it was. No lifeguard on duty, but it was a pool and it was indoors.

The basement drain was working fine, but it's in the highest part of the basement; if there's a logic to that, it escapes me. Laurie and I seized brooms and began sweeping water uphill towards the drain, and then fell to bailing in the far corner where we had about three inches. I drew upon my childhood memories of bailing out Grandpa Winship's gray wooden rowboats at Chautauqua Lake with a tin coffee can. Laurie however found a small, flat-sided wastebasket that did a much better job. After about three hours, we had the water ebbing away from the furnace and hot water heater, but there was still enough to splash around in.

Mid-morning, three men from the Village arrived in tall rubber boots and, after looking around, informed us that it had been raining all night. Having thus read from the Book of Knowledge, they left.

Tom our saintly handyman came and ripped up some low shelves to so we could get at the deepest water and the apparent source of the flow. He found an open pipe in the corner that could be a drain, and recommended we have someone unplug it.

Around mid-afternoon, Mike the plumber arrived and inspected the pipe. Could it indeed be a drain that would solve all our problems? His hand reached into it and disappeared up to the elbow. What courage. I was thinking water rats, steak knives, broken glass, a sudden grasping tentacle, but he reached down into the pipe without hesitation. He then informed us that the pipe went straight down, stopped and was open in every direction. It might have worked as a drain in the 1930's when the house was built, but had since "silted up" and was now a conduit for rising ground water.

The plumber brought in a portable pump and just as he was showing me how it worked, Abbie's Spanish teacher, Susan Welch, came to take her to Spain. This is not an everyday thing; rather, because we could not take Abbie to the airport for her first overseas adventure -- a one-week jaunt with her Spanish class - her teacher was picking her up. I gave Abbie a hug, wished her luck and then returned to the basement to learn more about pumps.

The plumber said I could use his pump for an hour, and while it ran I was advised to go buy my own. In the Skaneateles Lake watershed, there are many customers for pumps and I found a full selection at the True Value. I brought one home, hooked it up to a green garden hose that snaked across the basement floor, plugged in the orange cord and watched water gush out of the hose, down the drain and out of our house. And then suddenly all was dry. Because I had hired a plumber and bought a pump, the ground water stopped.

Two days later, we are still walking slowly, wincing when we bend, looking at chairs and stairs as if they are Mt. Everest. We are the New Old.

Abbie, meanwhile, is having a glass of wine with her lunch in a sun-drenched plaza in Madrid. There is a lot to be said for escape.