Those Darn Pipes

I was recently exchanging messages with a friend of mine and learned that we have more childhood experiences in common than we knew.  I chuckled when I learned that she had weekly run-ins with her pipes as a kid too!

I sleep hard

Until my late 20's, I was hell to wake up in the mornings.  My wife might argue that I still am from time to time.  When we were kids, my sister would literally throw water on me to get me out of bed.  I'd wake up in such a violent fit that she'd throw the water while standing in my doorway and shut the door before the water hit me.  This was a daily routine.  I'd wake up, realize that I wasn't being attacked, and lay my blankets out on the floor to dry.  In the wintertime, if I woke up to my sister yelling and poking me with a broom handle instead of throwing water, it usually meant only one thing: frozen pipes.

From 1995-1997, we lived in a pretty decent trailer just a few miles outside the city of Sunbury, PA.

For those of you who have lived in a mobile home, I'm sure you know the drill.  You probably also agree that I'm being kind by calling these things "pipes".  They were more like long, fragile, super-sized, gray plastic straws.  If the pipes were old enough and it was cold enough, they'd snap like a twig if you weren't careful with them.  

  

Fortunately, I didn't do this

The first challenge of thawing the pipes was getting under the trailer.  Our trailer had vinyl skirting, which was actually nicer than the siding on the trailer itself.  It definitely jazzed up the place. First, I needed to carefully remove a section of the interlocked skirting.  My dad would light me up if I cracked or broke it, so the process was a bit like defusing a bomb.  You know how plastic gets really hard and brittle when it's cold?  This type of skirting was installed like vertical vinyl siding.  Each 18" or so piece locked tightly to the next piece, and it was all held at the top and bottom in a big vinyl track.  It was nothing to end up with a few cuts on my hand from getting pinched trying to pry and bend a piece of the skirting out of place.  "Why not just leave a piece of skirting out to make it easier to access again?" you might ask.  Great question!  You see, my dad had this commitment to making sure things were done right and finished.  The skirting wasn't "finished" if it wasn't all installed...even if it was on the backside of the trailer where nobody would ever see.  He'd know it was out of place, and that wasn't acceptable.  His perfectionism really made me mad as a kid, but I can appreciate some of it today.  One time, I tried to put the piece of skirting back so that it looked like it was installed properly, but it wasn't locked in place so that I could remove it easily next time the pipes froze.  He noticed, I got punished, and I didn't do it again.

Not mine, but still
very dungeon-ish

Now that the skirting was removed, it was time to enter the dungeon.  Underneath the trailer was an awful mix of dirt, dead rodents, wiring, ductwork, steel, and fiberglass insulation that had fallen from the floor.  It was tight under there, with probably no more than 12" of clearance in some spots.  There was 30 feet of pipe from my sister's room (where the well pipe came in) to the kitchen, with the bathroom in between.  There was no telling if some or all of it was frozen.  I'd usually start in the middle.  My tools consisted of some orange camo coveralls, a flashlight, an extension cord, and a hair dryer.  Today, I chuckle every time I see the safety plug at the end of the cord of any modern hair dryer.  We were old-school back then.  No safety plug.  No GFCI outlets.  I'd start heating the pipes with the hair dryer, and my sister would open every faucet in the house so we'd know when the ice broke loose.  It was cold, uncomfortable, and itchy from the fiberglass blowing around.  I could heat up about 4 or 5 feet of pipe from the same spot before I had to crawl to a new location.  I used the hair dryer to warm my face and hands every once in awhile.  It was miserable but simple work.  I needed to hurry if I wanted a shower before the school bus came.  

At some point, the pipes would start to jump around as the ice broke up and water started flowing again.  I'd howl with excitement. You'd have thought Ed McMahon just knocked on our door! 

Of course, there was always the risk that one of the pipes had cracked after it froze.  There was no way to tell until it was too late. Every once in awhile, my excitement would quickly shift to panic mode as I got showered with water from a broken pipe.  Remember the hair dryer?  You know, the one in my hands underneath the water fountain that would soon create a muddy pool beneath me?  Fortunately, my sister could hear me yelling to shut off the water supply before anything serious happened.  After my first broken pipe experience, I learned to just throw the hair dryer out of the way whenever it happened again.

I know without a doubt that if my dad could have done it himself, he would have.  I think the biggest source of frustration throughout his adult life was with not being able to do things himself.  This meant that we learned to do things the way he would have done them.  In some cases, this really gave us an advantage over other kids our age by teaching us things we wouldn't have otherwise learned for another 10 or 15 years.  In other cases, it just sucked that he wouldn't cut us some slack or let us take any shortcuts - the skirting issue, for example.

A few years ago, we had a cold snap here in PA and we ended up with a frozen pipe under the floor in our kitchen.  I was so grateful to be able to climb a ladder in the basement and use my wife's hair dryer for 10 minutes to thaw the pipe.  No skirting, coveralls, or crawling required.  

Life is good, my friends.