The Broken Well

Lessons Don't Come Easy Here

That dribble between the two green pipes? It haunted me.

This past winter I noticed something wrong with my well. It was leaking from underneath the sealed cap. Water was flowing at an alarming rate. A steady stream like someone turned on a faucet. And since every night was below freezing, ice would pile up and coat sections of the well, and every day my anxiety grew worse.

I knew something was very wrong because in 15 years of living on this farm, the well had never leaked like this before. Whatever was broken was probably expensive and therefore, unfixable.

Podcast Listeners: If you’re picturing something out of a storybook, this isn’t that kind of well. I’m talking about an oversized green pipe coming out of the front lawn, about the width of a salad plate, with a cap screwed on tight. Unscrew the cap and what’s below that is the pumps and machinations that pull water from 400ft under this farm to the surface.

There is a natural overflow with my well, which is why there’s a buried gravity-fed pipe leading 30ft or so away from it downhill. There it pops out of the ground and cascades into a small stone pool, and that’s where I fill my buckets to carry water to the animals every day.

That overflow pipe has not stopped running, once. This mountain is a lake in drag. The surface lies. If you dig a few feet down anywhere, you’re going to hit water. I had to stop digging Gibson’s grave at about three feet before water started bubbling up around the shovel. I imagine 400ft down there’s just open water and my pipe is being circled by megalodons, dead pets, and wishes.

I called a well guy. It was either the end of February or early March when an octogenarian in a trucker cap stepped down from his truck to take a look. I walked him over to the well and showed him. He looked at it and said, “Your well cap is leaking” exactly like someone would say “The walls are vertical”.

I explained I understood, but didn’t know what it meant? I asked if it was supposed to do this? It’s never done it before? Golly, that’s a lot of water, huh? Is it dangerous to the house’s foundation? What about sinkholes? They do happen, one is probably happening right now! Did it need a replacement cap? Does it mean water isn’t getting through the overflow? How expensive would it be to hire a team that repairs such things? What would they do? Will I lose water to my house?

He looked at me, and then the cap, and said.

“Your well cap is leaking.”

I wrote him a check for $100 and he left.

My only consolation was that he didn’t seemed very concerned. I guess the issue was so bad he didn’t want to tell a single woman in ill-fitting clothes and unbrushed hair she was about to have a geyser in her front lawn or that the system was already too far gone to save.

So I googled, called friends, looked up videos; and all of them had different answers based on the well type and cap and leak spots and it seemed like it could be anything from a $26 replacement cap to a $15,000 (conservative estimate) new system. But they also had leaks coming from the sealed cap, not from underneath it like mine. This was some new kind of broken. Maybe the older gentlemen didn’t look down there? I wasn’t going to ask him to get on his knees in the snow and look at it…

I couldn’t let it go. I called another well specialist. The receptionist asked what the problem was and as I explained and she just listened and said, “Oh wow, oh boy!” with polite enthusiasm, as if I’d just announced an engagement. She said she’d have a repairman get in touch and explain. They never called back. I assumed no one wanted to tell me the bad news.

And so the well kept leaking. All through the winter, spring, and summer. Grass couldn't grow there, it was just mud. There was so much overflow that most of the few inches of topsoil had washed away. Stone and shale was becoming exposed. It ran downhill like any stream should.

The geese loved hanging around it. The cats loved drinking from it. When the horses were mowing they’d leave big prints and track mud on the grass, all of them mocking the one species on the farm responsible for the mortgage and repairs.

This was killing me. I had to turn on a fan to sleep, since the well was right outside my bedroom window. That evil trickle felt like Satan pissing on my lawn, reminding me that I’ll never be able to pull off this life long-term, certainly not much longer now that it’ll be swallowed by a sinkhole in my sleep. What a way to go. Poetic, even. The farmhouse I killed myself trying to save ate me alive. People in town would shake their heads and say “What a shame. She was funny at the bar..” and after a decent grief I’d be an urban legend. The only silver lining as I clenched my teeth in my dreams.

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It wasn’t until later this summer I realized what was happening. When a roofer was here replacing slates, I asked him about the well because he was an all around handyman and I’d been asking anyone with a pulse for months now. I was preparing for another hot take explaining how I’ll need to replace the whole system. Bad news is just expected around here. It never stops.

Instead, he showed me where the water was actually coming from, a small hole with a screen, exactly like your kitchen faucet. The cap wasn’t leaking at all. This had nothing to do with the cap. The well was so powerful, so loaded with water, it was overflowing in two places now. It was an abundance, not a crisis. He said it was something to be jealous of. Shallower farm wells were drying up in the lower valley and some people had to dig new ones with poor luck.

I’d never considered it was something good.

I didn’t occur to me that an outcome involving me and this farm would be easy or good. I expected to have accidently neglected something I didn’t know I was supposed to tend. All that worry and wasted professional time and my problem wasn’t a problem at all. My problem was my inability to accept that sometimes things are okay.

That older gentleman didn’t do anything because there was nothing to do. That other business never returned the call to explain to some idiot how wells work, because there wasn’t a problem to explain. Far as they were concerned a lottery winner was calling them to explain currency.

This well wasn’t broken. I was.

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A lot of us pace and fret about things we don’t fully understand. We assume the worst, our default settings are all set to negativity. But sometimes we’re making up problems just so our brain has something to gnaw on. And I understand that, more than most, but I am also trying something new: Expecting good.

Maybe, every once in a while, I can not brace myself for pain. Statistically, something has to go right eventually. The inevitable doesn’t have to be misery. The inevitable could be an overflowing abundance people in town are jealous of. Jealous of me.

Incredible.

So I collected stones and made a barrier on each side so the stream could flow where I wanted it to, right down to the other overflow pipe where they kiss and flow down into the mountain stream I fish brook trout from and wade my feet in. Grass is starting to come back on the outside edge, and it looks like I have a pet creek in my front lawn. I have decided to consider it charming.

I like how it sounds outside my bedroom window now. It helps me fall asleep.

How about that?

As Phoebe Bridgers says, It’ll all work out.