The Well Guy

The Well Guy is mad at me.
We came home from a long weekend in the mountains and noticed some rusty-looking water in the toilets.
Mary looked at me in that way of hers.
“What, what,” I said, “what did I do now?”
“Maybe it’s what you didn’t do,” she said, cryptically, but I knew what she meant.
Later that night she got up to use the bathroom and when she got back in bed she elbowed me awake.
‘What, what,” I said, still half asleep: “what did I do now?” But I knew.
I had been lying there dreading what was about to happen.
She handed me a flashlight. “Maybe it’s not too late,” she said, pulling the covers off me, and using the cold soles of her feet to propel me out of bed.

Our well pit is just off to the side of the front lawn. I put on my slippers and an old gray robe and trundled out the front door, flashlight in hand. When I reached the well pit, I put down the flashlight and heaved off the concrete cover.
A belch of overheated, yet still damp air came whooshing out of the concrete room, followed moments later by the reassuring, repetitive sound of our 7-year old jet pump going about its business. There was hope yet, I thought...
Carefully I got down on all fours and, inching my head out over the pit opening, flashed the light down into the dark, cylindrical chamber.
The beam landed first on the big red pump, then found a large gray tank, reflected off the shiny backs of a variety of tiny bugs and slimy looking lizards, followed a coil of heavy black hose leading from ground to pump to tank and then back into the ground –but no little yellow man.
‘Darn!” I said out loud, too loud: for my voice bounced round the dank tube and came tooting out like a Tugboat’s horn.

When I was a kid we traveled a lot, but that never seemed to simplify the routine that we had to follow before we could actually leave the house.
Before you could go anywhere there was a list of duties you had to perform. You had to turn off the heat, unplug appliances, go to the post office and discontinue your mail. Then you had to tell the milkman not to deliver, the relatives not to call, get someone to feed the parrot, and make sure you left a few boxes of pizza crusts and a carton or two of sour milk for the Well Guy.
Boy, have things changed. Today people think nothing of just dropping everything and taking off: often forgetting though, that while they are away the Well Guy will play.
Come on: you wouldn’t just leave your teenage boys home alone while you went on vacation, would you? The Well Guy deserves at least as much attention as teenagers, maybe more.
Oh, you say you don’t have a Well Guy: in fact you don’t even have a well. Sure, fine, you can believe what you want. But tell me why is it that whenever you go away, or whenever the checkbook gets particularly thin, or whenever you think you’ve got this homeowner thing licked something always goes wrong –something expensive?
No matter how modern your home is there is always something that you depend on that you just don’t have a clue how to fix: your car, or the lawnmower, or the refrigerator, or the air-conditioner, or the well.
Call him by any name that you feel comfortable with: the Well Guy, Troll, Gremlin, but just admit that whatever his name, he’s down there in the dark, waiting.

Think about it: out there in a dark, cold hole in the ground is a little yellow guy who asks nothing more than that you spare him a few scraps now and then. And in exchange for those meager scraps he is going to make sure that pump keeps pumping and water keeps flowing to the tub and the shower and the toilets, day after day, month after month, and year after year.
You know you can’t do it all on your own.
You know that even the best well drilling companies are going to charge you an arm and a leg every time they pay you a visit. Look at the trucks they drive around in: mini-derricks with which they plumb the very depths of the earth for that most precious of fluids: and it’s water, not gas!

It never fails though: a few weeks go by without a major disaster or a faulty appliance and we have ourselves convinced that we are on top of these things. After all, we bought the latest equipment, we have insurance on our insurance. What could go wrong?
Suddenly somebody’s elbowing us in the middle of the night because there is nothing but air coming out of the spigot.
Is there a more pitiable sound than the death rattle of air through a faucet?
How long can you go without a shower?
How long can you go without a glass of water?
How long can you go without that miracle of modern life –the flush toilet?
Now matter how long you can go, the Well Guy can go longer!
Take it from somebody who knows.

Institutional Racism

It seems clear, to me at least, that the best argument for the existence of institutional racism in this country, is now on display in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi.

The racial epithets and Jim Crow segregation of the distant past are now shown, I believe, to pale in significance when compared with the centuries of economic neglect that have eroded the very foundations of our so-called civilization.

Hurricane Katrina, and a FEMA decimated by a government of ideologues who considered that organization a wasteful outgrowth of discredited New Deal democracy, produced twin storm surges that no levee could ever withstand.

Is there a stronger argument for the role of a truly compassionate government in the lives of its citizens? And can there be a clearer warning of the danger of a goverment -and a judiciary, content with Constitutional abstractions?

Now is not the time for political expediency: an appointee to the agency responsible for protecting Americans against the ravages of huricanes or earthquakes or tornadoes must be an expert in the field, not an old friend from Houston. And similarly, the nominee to lead the highest court in the land, no matter how well educated and telegenic, cannot be considered qualified without any actual Supreme Court experience.

The Bush administration has been remarkably well focused on the goal of removing the vestiges of FDR's 'New Deal', especially those policies and programs which directly support the individual in times of need. Their main weapon in this attack has been the placement of what can only be called 'Fifth Columnists': appointees who are either so inept that they simply stand-by in silence while their departments are taken apart, or so opposed to the work of the departments that they are selected to lead, that they obstruct the work themselves.

I am very concerned that 'Mr. Roberts' is yet another political appointee, such as the last two heads of FEMA and a hundred other Bush appointees, who has been chosen not for what he may accomplish, but for what he will impede; not for what he believes, but for what he opposes; not for what he is willing to say, but for what he is willing to hide.

In the wake of the twin storms of Katrina and FEMA, can we afford to believe anything else?