#48 Save Water
Jul 24th, 2008 by doing better
On my recent holiday in Sweden, we had no running water. My boyfriend’s family had forgotten to have the plumber connect the water in their summer house after the winter, and when we arrived the only plumber on the island was away on vacation.
My boyfriend and I were alone in a house in the woods, miles from anywhere. We had four buckets that we used to carry water up the hill from the lake. It was an exhausting journey. He found an old wooden yoke of his grandfather’s which had been used for the same purpose fifty years ago.
We used two of the buckets in the kitchen, to wash the dishes, and two in the bathroom, to flush the toilet. I had no idea you could flush a toilet just by pouring a rapid flow of water into it. Dishwashing took a long time because we had to heat the water on the stove first, and we usually had to interrupt the proceedings to go back to the lake with the buckets. It was a good thing we had electricity. If we’d had to chop wood to make the fire to heat the water to wash the dishes, there would not have been much leisure time. I could see why women in the old days spent all their time on housework.
We quickly became very sparing with our water. “Is this really worth a flush, or should I go outside?” was a question I soon learned to ask myself. We developed bucket etiquette (always leaving enough water in the bathroom for at least one flush). We had some perilous trips down to the lake in dark, rainy conditions, but it was always a good feeling when all four buckets were filled and ready.
When I brushed my teeth (we had brought a separate yet inadequate supply of drinking water) I looked longingly at the faucet, remembering how I used to take it for granted and how much water I used to waste. If only I could have a little of that water now, I thought.
We heated water and washed ourselves as best we could. It wasn’t warm enough to get clean by swimming in the lake. Every couple of days we walked half an hour to the marina, where you could pay 5 kronor (about a dollar) for three minutes of shower. This was bliss. For my first shower, I went alone, and luckily for me the shop staff spoke English so I could get change for the shower. When I tried to throw away our bag of garbage, however, I was confronted with a padlocked dumpster and signs in Swedish. I felt stupid and illiterate, and I was too embarrassed to go back in the shop and ask where I could throw away my bag. I wandered around the marina looking for a trash can and somewhere to fill up my water bottle, but I felt more and more demoralized by the Swedish signs and my own illiteracy.
After my shower I tried to come back via a shortcut that I only half-remembered from last year. I lost my way in the woods and stumbled around for a while getting more and more frustrated and tired. I knew where I needed to go, but I couldn’t find the path, so I picked my way over the mossy floor of the forest. I saw a lot of deer, and I didn’t get any ticks, but that was the best of it. Fortunately at that point my boyfriend had not yet told me about the wolves and bears in Sweden. Finally at about ten p.m. (it was still light at that latitude) I found the road and made my way home to dinner.
On our next trip to the marina, there was a Saturday night party in full swing, with drunk people singing folk songs and rattling the handle of the shower because they thought it was the toilet. They were all beautifully Aryan. (My boyfriend is annoyed when I say that everyone looks the same, especially the children, but it’s true. It is also my opinion that Swedish sounds absurd, like English spoken by someone in their sleep, but he doesn’t like to hear that either.)
On our last day we ran out of drinking water. We tried boiling lake water, but it didn’t taste very good and had bits of stuff floating in it. After two weeks, when we finally got back to town and turned on the faucet, it was the most miraculous glass of water I have drunk in my life.