Blackout Water

If you have grandkids and a kitchen faucet, please read this👆

The man who rented Cabin 6 from me two weeks ago paid for three nights in cash, wrote a first name on my registration card that was not the one on his driver's license, asked me on Wednesday what runs the pump on our well, and on Thursday night, out on my office porch, told me who signs his paycheck. Four days on our place and I never once saw a phone in his hand. Never asked for the WiFi password. Walked down to the creek by himself every evening about sundown and just stood there. I have not told a soul what he said to me that Thursday, not even at church. I'm typing it out now because everything that has been on the news since he left goes right back to that question he asked me about my well. Dale and I have rented out these six cabins for nineteen years. You hand enough strangers a key and you get to where you can size one up before the car door shuts. The fly fisherman who is going to lie about what he caught. The couple up for their anniversary who aren't speaking. The widower who books the same cabin every October and does not want to be asked why. After nineteen years I don't work at it. It just happens. I knew Glenn was something else before he got to my counter. Tuesday, a little before noon. He came up our gravel alone in a plain white sedan and parked at the far end of the lot, not by the office door like everybody does. One bag. A green canvas duffel gone soft at the corners. He stopped in the office doorway before he said a word. Looked at the map of the property I keep on the wall, the one with the cabins and the creek and the road out. Like a man counting doors. Around sixty. Trim. Reading glasses on a cord. Yes ma'am, no ma'am. Didn't ask how the fishing was. Didn't take a brochure for the caverns. Didn't ask where a person gets supper around here. Cash. Three nights. Counted it out in twenties. I ask every guest for a license for the file. The one he slid across said Thomas. The card he filled out said Glenn. I let it lie. Then he took the key, drove down to Cabin 6 and backed that car in behind it so the plate faced the woods. In nineteen years nobody has paid me cash for three nights. Nobody has written down a name that wasn't his while I stood there holding the proof. And nobody has ever come to stay on a fishing creek without a rod. By Wednesday suppertime I had swallowed about six questions I would normally have asked out loud. Thursday night, a quarter to ten. Dale had gone up to the house at eight, he gets up at four-thirty. I was on the office porch folding cabin towels with the screen door propped so I could hear the little TV on the counter. Glenn was in the other rocker on his second beer. He had been there since before dark. Hardly a word. Looking out at where the creek is. You can't see it from there at night. You can only hear it. The news gave Iran about half a minute. Gas up thirteen cents in a week, national average four twenty-seven. One sentence about talks. Then the weather. Glenn listened to it through the screen. Never turned his head. When the weather map came up he said, more to the beer can than to me, "Half a minute. They have got it down to half a minute." I quit folding. I said, "What is that supposed to mean." He took his time. He said, "Nothing. Thinking out loud." I said, "You have been here three days and I bet you haven't said twenty words to me. You've sat on my porch two hours tonight and not asked me one thing about myself, which I promise you is a record for that chair. A man that quiet finally says something, I want to hear the rest of it." He looked right at me for the first time since he checked in. He said, "You watch that every night?" I said, "Every night." He said, "How does it leave you feeling?" I said, "How does it leave me feeling." He said, "The Iran part. Ceasefire. No ceasefire. Paper signed. Strait shut again. What are you left with when it goes to the weather." I had to think about it. I said, "Like I have seen it already. Like it's a rerun. April they had a ceasefire. June President Trump signed that Islamabad paper with Iran's president and three days later the strait was closed again. I quit trying to keep it straight. Last week I got up and started the dishwasher right in the middle of it." He nodded one time. He said, "That is what it's for." I waited. I said, "What what's for." He drank. Set the can on the porch rail. He said, "I ought not to. I don't know you and I don't know who you'd tell. But you caught it when I said it. Mostly people don't. And I have not said any of this out loud to anybody outside my building since March." He looked at the can. He said, "I work for the Energy Department. Emergency planning. I write the long papers on what happens over here if that strait stays shut." He looked up. He said, "I should not have said that. I'd take it kindly if you forgot it." I said, "Glenn." He said, "Yeah." I said, "You paid me cash." He said, "Yeah." I said, "Your license says Thomas." He said, "It does." I said, "You backed your car in so nobody can read the plate from the road." He said, "Yeah." I said, "And yesterday you asked me what runs my well pump." He said, "I know I did." I set the towel down. I said, "What is going on." He looked out at the dark a good while. Then he looked back at me. --- He said, "What they tell you about Iran is true as far as it goes. It just quits halfway. Every night. On purpose." I waited. He said, "The half you get is the cover for the half you don't." I said, "The half I don't being what." He took a drink. He said, "Look how it runs. April, ceasefire. Ten days on, Iran shuts the strait again. May, the Navy starts escorting ships. June, Trump and Pezeshkian sign the memorandum and everybody lets their breath out. Three days. Shut again. July the truce comes apart. August the Navy says it has cleared better than a hundred suspected mines, and that sounds like headway. It is the middle of September and that water is still shut." He looked at me. He said, "You felt it tonight. I watched you. 'It's a rerun.' Now put that in every living room in the country, every night, for six months." A drink. He said, "Folks who notice get tired. Tired folks quit keeping track. Folks who quit keeping track quit asking the one question my office would rather not get asked on camera." He set the can down. I said, "Which is what." He looked at me. He said, "What a closed strait does to your house." I said, "The strait is on every single night." He said, "The strait is on every single night. The map. The little ship pictures. The reporter in the vest. You have heard the word Hormuz more since March than in all your life before it." He looked out at the dark. He said, "What you have not heard, not one time, is what it means for a woman with six cabins and a well if it stays shut through the winter." I waited. He said, "That half never airs. The strait gets the map and the man in the vest. Your kitchen, your daughter's kids' school, the hospital in town, they get nothing." I said, "So what does it do." He took a drink. He said, "A fifth of the oil in the world goes through that water in a normal year. Twenty million barrels a day. The man who runs the International Energy Agency called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. On the record, his words. The rich countries drained four hundred million barrels out of their emergency tanks last spring, the most they ever have, and oil is over a hundred dollars anyway. The Philippines declared a national energy emergency in March. Slovenia started rationing gas the day before that, fifty liters a day to a driver. That's Asia and Europe, so you got it for one evening if you got it at all." He looked at me. He said, "It comes here. I could not tell you the week." He took a drink. He said, "Forget gasoline a minute. Think about diesel. Diesel is the truck that carries the treatment chemicals to your town's water plant. Diesel is the backup generator at the pump station. Diesel is the crew that comes out to fix the line. When diesel gets short and gets dear, all the slack goes out. Nothing breaks that day. It's that the next time something does break there is nothing standing behind it." He set the can down. He said, "Watch for the word 'voluntary.' Voluntary conservation. After that, 'advisory.' After that a schedule with your county's name on it. That is the order I would bet on, and I get paid to bet on it." He looked at me. He said, "And here is the piece nobody is going to hand you when it gets here." I waited. He said, "Who goes without has already been written down. I have read it. In January the Department signed an emergency order for Texas. In May it signed another one, for the grid that runs thirteen states and D.C. They spell out how the big data centers get pushed onto their own generators as the last step before the rolling blackouts start. Those orders are public. Nobody read them." He looked at me. He said, "Somebody has already sat down and worked out what order things get switched off in. There is a list. Your kitchen faucet is not on anybody's list. Nobody ever wrote a paper about your well." He let that sit. He said, "So when it comes they will call it a freak thing. A bad week. A once in a lifetime storm. They will call it that the next time too." I didn't say anything for a while. He took a drink. He said, "Tired is what they are after. I've sat in the meetings where my long version gets boiled down to the short one. A tired country does not look underneath anything. By the time your lights flicker you will have been told for a year that it's all nearly settled." I didn't say anything for a long time. --- He took another long drink. He said, "A lot of people in this country figure they are getting ready for something. Canned goods. Silver. Gas cans. Guns, ammunition. A generator from the home center, still in the box." He looked at me. He said, "Nearly every one of them skipped the first thing." I waited. He said, "Water." I said, "Water." He said, "Water." He took a drink. He said, "Nobody on that TV is going to say it. You turn the handle, it comes out. Been that way every day of your life. Mine too. A person can't hardly picture it any other way." He looked at me. He said, "Water is the first thing to go when the power runs short." I waited. He said, "Every treatment plant runs off the power company. Every pump station. Every pump between the river and somebody's sink. And you, you are on a well. Two hundred eighty feet, electric pump, you told me so yourself. The power drops, you've got what's sitting in the pressure tank and that's all you have got." He stopped a second. He said, "Texas. February of 2021. The grid went down in a freeze, and by that Saturday fourteen million people in a hundred and ninety counties had their water fouled up. A hundred and fifty thousand had none at all. Better than two thousand water systems put out boil notices and some of those ran past a month. The head of the state's own environmental agency said it plain. 'My family, my dog, my eight chickens are on day four without water at my house.'" He looked at me. He said, "That was weather. Nobody did that to them. Richmond, Virginia, January of last year. One power outage at the water plant. One. The valves could not close without power, the low rooms took on six feet of water inside ten minutes, and the city and three counties around it boiled their water the better part of a week." He let that sit. He said, "What I write papers about is not one cold snap and it is not one plant." I let that sit too. I said, "We would drive to town and buy water." He said, "You and everybody. Austin, Texas, 2018. Boil notice. The shelves were bare in hours. The grocery chain down there ran better than a hundred trailers of water in one day to catch up, and that was one city with every truck in Texas free to come help. Now picture every city the same week, and the trucks short on diesel." He looked at me. He said, "You have grandkids." It was not a question. He had seen the crayon fish taped up in my office window. I said, "Three. The oldest is eleven." He said, "Some evening about a week into it the littlest one is going to ask you for a drink. And you are going to be standing in your own kitchen with a dry faucet and nothing to hand her." He looked at me. He said, "That is the evening to get ready for. Forget the war and the memorandum and the map with the ships on it. A child and an empty cup. Nobody on TV is going to walk you up to that one ahead of time." I didn't say anything. --- He took another long drink. He said, "The people I work with are fixed for it." I waited. He said, "Two men in my section squared their houses away in March, the week the strait closed. My deputy did hers in June and never said a word. I only know because her husband told my wife at a cookout. There is a retired Army engineer who consults for us and he has been set since the Texas freeze. None of them talk about it at work. None of them are scared either. They have just decided they are not going to be the one standing in that kitchen." He looked at me. He said, "Yesterday. The well." I said, "Yeah." He said, "I was not making conversation. I was checking." I said, "Checking what." He said, "Whether you had ever thought about it. Somebody who has thought about it answers different. They tell you about the hand pump, or the tank, or the spring up the hill. You told me two hundred eighty feet, electric pump, never gave you a day's trouble. Like I'd asked if it looked like rain. So I knew." He set the can down. He said, "Right now you are thinking this is for the bunker crowd. The fellas on cable with the freeze-dried buckets. You are about to tell me you're not a prepper." I was, too. I had my mouth open to say it. He said, "That part works best of all. Long as getting ready looks like something only odd people do, regular people won't do it. Then it comes, and the only ones who were ready are the handful everybody laughed at." He looked at the can. He said, "It all pushes the same direction. The rerun. The being tired. Half a minute and then the weather. It all leaves you sitting still. So when it does come you are sitting right where you were." He took a drink. He said, "Power is the handle. The power goes and the water goes with it. The water goes and you are not running your own house anymore. When the kids drink, when you cook, when you wash, whether the commode flushes, every bit of it waits on whoever decides when the lights come back. You have never had one day without that say-so, so you never noticed you had it." He looked at me. He said, "What you want is something that takes that handle out of their hand ahead of time. Water that comes whether the power does or it doesn't. Something that is in your house this week." He set the can down. He said, "And I do not mean a bunker. I don't mean a pallet of army meals or a generator or a cistern. I mean a tube. About nine inches long. Rides in a coat pocket. Anybody can own one and anybody can work one." He moved the can over. Put his hand flat on his jacket pocket and left it there. --- I said, "A tube." He didn't answer for a bit. He said, "I ought not show you." I said, "You already told me." He looked out at the dark again, where the creek was going by. He said, "Yeah." He took it out of his jacket. Held it in his lap a second. He said, "You keep this to yourself. Dale included. Until you have made up your mind what you are going to do about any of it." I said all right. He set it on the arm of my rocker. A plain tube about nine inches long. I picked it up. More to it than it looked. Solid. I said, "What is it." He said, "A filter." I turned it over. I said, "A filter for what." He said, "Water." I said, "That's all." He said, "That's all." I waited. I could tell he was done volunteering. I said, "How does it work." He looked at his jacket. Then at the tube. He said, "Threads onto a water bottle. Any regular one. The empties in your recycling." I said, "And then." He said, "Then you drink through it. Or you lay down on the bank and drink straight out of the creek with it, if it came to that. Or you hang the bottle upside down and let it drip into a pot." I said, "And what comes out." He said, "Water you can drink." I said, "What's inside it." He looked at me a second. He said, "Two stages in one straw. First a membrane with holes one hundredth of a micron across. Bacteria will not fit through a hole that size. Parasites won't either. Then a carbon stage. The carbon is for chemicals and sediment." I held it up to the porch light like that would tell me something. I said, "Any water." He said, "Any fresh water. Creek. Pond. Rain barrel. A bathtub you filled before the storm got there. Not the ocean. It won't take out salt." I said, "How long is one good for." He said, "Eighteen hundred gallons." I said, "That doesn't mean a thing to me." He said, "The government's own emergency page tells you to figure a gallon a person a day. So call it close to five years for one person." I said, "And then." He said, "Then you get another one. But it does not go bad sitting. No expiration date on it. Leave it in a drawer ten years." I said, "What do you plug it into." He said, "Nothing. No batteries. No pump. You are drinking through a tube." I turned it over again. I said, "This is what the people you work with have." He looked at the dark. He said, "It's what I have. There is one in my daughter's glovebox and she doesn't know it's in there." I waited. I said, "Show me." He looked at me. He said, "Ma'am, I drove nine hours to sit by a creek and not talk to anybody. I did not come here to put on a demonstration." I said, "I want to see it work." He looked at the dark again. Then he got up. Slow, the way you do when your knees have a say. He said, "You got a flashlight." He went down to the creek with my flashlight and the plastic pitcher I make sun tea in. I watched the light bob. He didn't dip from the middle where it runs clear. He went down by the low-water crossing where the neighbor's cows come through, and he came back with a pitcher the color of weak coffee. Bits of leaf in it. Something in there was swimming. He fished an empty water bottle out of my recycling tub, the grocery store kind. Poured the creek water in. You could see the trash floating in it. Threaded the tube onto the top. Tipped the whole thing up over one of my jelly glasses. It came slow. A thin stream. Clear. He held the glass up to the porch light. Clear. Nothing floating. No color to it at all. He handed it to me. I am not going to lie to you. I stood there holding it. He didn't push. I drank it. No taste. No grit. No creek. It tasted like a glass of water at my own sink on any morning of my life. Just water. I looked at the pitcher. Then the glass. Then Glenn. I said, "That is the creek." He said, "Yeah." I said, "From below where the cows cross." He said, "Yes ma'am." Glenn unthreaded the tube and held it out to me. He said, "Keep it." I took it. I walked up to the house at eleven with that tube in my cardigan pocket. I did not sleep. --- Friday morning Dale was at the kitchen table with his coffee and the farm report on. I came in and set the tube down beside his cup. He looked at it. Looked at me. He said, "What's that." I told him. All of it. He said I'd been had. Said a fella drinks two beers on a porch and all of a sudden he's with the government, he has heard that one before. Said I watch too much news and he has been telling me so since spring. I got my boots on and went down to the creek. Same pitcher. Same spot. The cows were standing in it this time. I did the whole thing in front of him. Bottle out of the recycling, brown water in, leaves and all. Tube on top. Tipped it over a jelly glass and set the glass down by his coffee. He looked at me. He looked at the pitcher. He looked at the glass. He drank it. Dale did not say anything for a good minute. For Dale that isn't unusual, but this was a different kind of quiet. He picked up the pitcher and held it to the window. Set it down. Picked up the tube. Turned it over twice. Set it down. Then he said, real low, "He tell you where a person gets these?" --- Glenn pulled out Saturday morning before six. He came up to the office with the one duffel. Paid me cash for the extra night. Asked whether I aimed to do something with what he had told me or just think about it. I told him do. He nodded one time. Put the duffel on the back seat. Went down our gravel slow enough he didn't raise any dust. I haven't heard from him. I don't expect I will. That was nine days ago. In those nine days. Friday, the morning after that porch, drones shut down Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline. That is the main way to move oil out overland, around the strait. I only know because I went looking. Sunday a ship was struck in the strait, and the word was the talks with Iran were not starting back up. Eight ships made it through that whole day. Before all this it was eighty-five a day. Wednesday. Wichita, Kansas. About five in the morning the main water plant and pump station lost power. The plant was already running on its backup generators on account of a storm, and the generators quit. It was out about forty-five minutes. The pressure fell, and around half a million people, one out of every six people in Kansas, were told to boil their water. Some grade schools closed. The radio station there ran a picture of the water shelves at a grocery store, empty. The last piece of that system did not get cleared until Sunday afternoon. Forty-five minutes. Friday, Duluth, Minnesota. Power outage, pressure dropped, boil notice. Iran's parliament speaker says the strait "will remain closed until Iran's conditions are met." Three hundred seventy-two ships are sitting out there going nowhere. Oil is a hundred and three dollars. Saturday night I watched all of it get its half a minute and I thought about what he said. It's a rerun. Folks who notice get tired. Tired folks quit keeping track. Folks who quit keeping track quit asking. And I thought about how I answered him about my well. Like he had asked me if it looked like rain. And what that told him about people like me. That tube has been in my purse eleven days. Dale ordered ten of them. Two of the five-packs. One five-pack for our daughter Shelby's house, which is her, Travis and the three kids. The other five are one for my truck, one for his, one for the office drawer, one for the bag in the hall closet that Dale swears is not a go bag, and one for Miss Opal next door, who is eighty-four and on a well the same as us. He did not tell me. I know because the order confirmation came to the cabin email, and because there is a feed store receipt on the refrigerator now with all that written on the back in his block letters. He saw me reading it. He poured himself another cup and went out to the shop. That is how a man changes his mind in this house. He makes a list. --- If you have been watching the news since spring and feeling like it's a rerun, a deal and then no deal, the strait open and then shut, and you've caught yourself getting up to start the dishwasher in the middle of it, I did too. I don't believe anymore that feeling comes from nowhere. Somebody is just fine with you being that tired. They need you worn out. They need you sick of it. They need you looking at that map every night without one person telling you what it does to your own house if the strait stays shut another month. You get the map. You get the ships. You never get the arithmetic. Glenn gave me the arithmetic on my porch that Thursday. The strait shuts off the fuel. Short fuel takes the slack out of the power. No power, no water. And it does not take days. Ask Wichita. It took forty-five minutes. Once there is one simple thing in your kitchen drawer that gets your family clean water with no power at all, that is one thing nobody can switch off on you. Glenn never did say where he got his. Dale ran it down himself that same morning. It is called the Blackout Water Survival Straw, and they sell it off their own website, right here: 👉 https://www.tryblackoutwater.com/pages/advertorial They give you 365 days to send it back and get every cent refunded, no forms and no questions. Dale read that part twice hunting for the catch. Shipping is free. I can't tell you how quick it comes because the site does not say, so please don't wait on a storm to order. If you are going to do this, do it before the next half a minute and the weather talks you out of it. You will not be sorry you were the one in your family who had these in a drawer before it mattered. You would be sorry the other way around. 👉 https://www.tryblackoutwater.com/pages/advertorial P.S. Yesterday, Sunday, Bloomington, Indiana went under a boil advisory. The water had gone cloudy, nothing to do with Iran and nothing to do with the power. By two or three that afternoon the local paper had the water shelves at the Kroger and the Walmart mostly empty and the downtown Kroger just about cleaned out. The same day. Glenn told me the shelves go in hours. He told me that on a Thursday night. It has been eleven days and I have watched it happen twice, Wichita and Bloomington, and neither one of those was even the thing he is worried about. If he is right about the small ones I am not going to bet my grandkids he's wrong about the big one. P.P.S. I called my sister Connie in Tulsa that first Saturday and told her the whole thing. Connie has been teasing me about my pantry since 1989 and she laughed till she had to set the phone down. Then Wednesday came. Her girl lives in Wichita with two little ones, and she was boiling water on the stove for those babies with the store shelves bare. Connie called me back Thursday and she was not laughing. All she said was, "What was the name of that website." She bought a five-pack for her house and another to carry up to Wichita. That is the way to think about the five-pack. One for every person in the house is where you start. Then one for each car, and one in the bag by the door. Count heads, count cars, add one. For most families that is five. For ours it was ten. P.P.P.S. Eighteen hundred gallons to a straw. At the gallon a day the government tells you to plan on, that is close to five years of drinking water for one person, and 450 days for a family of four sharing one. A membrane with holes one hundredth of a micron across for bacteria and parasites, and a carbon stage for chemicals and sediment. Threads onto a regular water bottle. Nothing to plug in. No expiration date, sits in a drawer ten years. There is a little syringe in the pack for flushing it clean. The five-pack comes with their survival guide and sixteen emergency checklists thrown in free. Free shipping. And 365 days to change your mind and get every cent back. P.P.P.P.S. If you are reading this and thinking you will just pick up a few cases of water at Costco, read this part. Water in the garage is a number. A case of twenty-four bottles is about three gallons. The government says plan on a gallon a person a day. A family of four goes through more than a case a day. So count your cases. Ten cases is about a week. Twenty cases is about two weeks, if your back can stack them, and every glass anybody pours makes the number smaller. I have nothing against stored water. We have some. But it only ever goes one direction. A filter doesn't count down. As long as there is fresh water you can walk to, a creek, a pond, a rain barrel, the bathtub you filled the night before, you have drinking water. For eighteen hundred gallons. Not for a week. That is the piece the cases in your garage are missing. The part that keeps going. If you only do one thing this week 👉 https://www.tryblackoutwater.com/pages/advertorial