Some friends I’ve had for half a century are visiting the island, and they came by to see our place today. It was great to see them, but partway through their visit our hired hand came up to me with a look of consternation on his face. He had been working on clearing part of the gulch.
There is quite a large gulch on our property. It is steep and deep. It is a protected waterway. At our makai border the water goes through a culvert under our neighbors’ driveway. There is no way to fence the gulch to keep Luna the Big Dog™ in or the feral pigs out, so instead we have fenced the rest of the property off from the gulch and ceded the gulch to the pigs and the mist forest. In short, the gulch is a jungle. There is even reputed to be a lava tube (cave) down inside it, but I haven’t had time for spelunking.
The water meter is out there past the makai end of the property, and the feeder pipe runs along the outside edge of the gulch the whole width of our property (400+ feet) to the house. Most of that is through the jungle. I had assumed it was mostly buried, but today as our hired hand was clearing the understory he saw a fountain. We thought it was probably the pipe down to the studio, which we know runs precariously across the gulch, strung from tree branches, and that it was destined to break as it is white PVC that gets sun exposure. Not a lot, due to the jungle nature, but white PVC and sunlight really don’t mix.
It wasn’t the studio pipe.
It was the main feeder from the meter to the house. Someone had put a tee in it and a spigot for filling a stock watering trough which we didn’t even know existed until we started clearing. Did I mention “jungle”?
So we had to turn the water off at the meter. I have a lot of PVC fittings, but they’re almost all 1” or larger. They were too big for the broken pipe (which broke in a second spot as we were trying to trace it). The Hand went scouting around the scrap under the studio and found two — and only two — ¾” elbows, which were exactly what could repair the breaks. He glued them (I had PVC cement), and three hours later I turned the water on. Success! Without even going down the mountain to the hardware store!
Now I just need to have the discipline to locate and replace the rest of the pipe before it breaks again.
—2p