We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

Most of the time, living at Cooter Hollow is an experience at which we marvel. If we’re lucky, this marveling is done over a glass of whiskey with an icicle to keep it cool, while basking in the pre-pre-dawn glow of Venus and doing some vicarious surfing over the fact that most think it a UFO. I’m saying, it can be rough here, but it’s tranquil, and it’s ours.

Then there are the days when your backup heater has blown up, and your power inverter somehow can’t do anything other than immediately blow any fuse it deigns to let you feed it. Those are likely to be the days when living in Crapartments governed by Scumlords sounds really just great, even with the fridge you can never quite remedy of its curdled-milk-and-catpuke smell.

Those are likely to be the days, also, when you come home from work and ask your fellow, “Fellow? Why’s there two inches of water standing in the shower?”

(N.B.: We don’t use the shower at Cooter Hollow. When you bring your own water up the mountain, you want as little as possible to dash back down the drain. You find other places to bathe)

Wherein he explains to you, as calmly as he can, that the only likely explanation is that your grey water tank, which has an outlet that opens into a hole in the ground (for reasons already mentioned: only a little daily dishwater ever goes that way, after all), is likely frozen. Likely, it’s been frozen for a long time, and we didn’t notice. Likely, it’s completely backed up, in fact, and we’re on top of an ice cube the size of the thing, which is mostly inaccessible thanks to the superfine job we did insulating this place last winter.

And while he might have explained all this as calmly as he can, there was no shortage of despondent shaking of his head, and a few neologisms formed by the tmetic insertion of the word “fucking” into every third or fourth word delivered. These are the days when you miss the apartment with the rat infestation. These are the days when the only possible way out of this problem seems to be to rig a pump with hose (like this one, that so joyously served a different purpose) in the shower, and pump the standing water out the window. For the next five months. And we live like animals, but we don’t live like those animals, and the thought of this way of living brings the melodramatics, and is just too maudlin for me to even conceive it.

So, we did what any reasonable couple might do: we dropped it, and went to the bar. And there, with every ounce of hopelessness I could muster (and I can really pull it, the hopelessness, when called upon), I told the whole sordid filthy icy story, and while I didn’t do with the “fucking” what the fundamentalists have done to Twain, I also didn’t take it quite to his emphatic level, only punctuating the anecdote with a “we’re fucked, eh?”

Let me break, here, to tell you a little story. Once, a long time ago, in the salad days of easy living and disposable income, I and two friends were in a rental care driving to a weekend’s condign escape from the city, where we were fully ensconced in a highly competitive, bordering incendiary game of drunken twenty questions. We’d narrowed the mystery object down to a root vegetable, but not a potato, carrot, or onion, or radish, or yam, or even a turnip, and we had one question left, and which I’d managed to stretch into fractions of questions for maybe an hour (in drunk-time).

Finally, thinking myself entirely cunning, I “noticed” that I was out of cigarettes, and we pulled over at a Mobil station.

(My god, for the days one could smoke freely and without guilt and not know the evil of quitting!)

So, I weaseled into the station, danced my way to the register, and asked for “A pack of Camel Lights, and also, do you know the name of a root vegetable that’s not a carrot, or a potato, or a yam, or an onion, or a radish, or a turnip?” and without flinching, without even stopping to think, or to let the request sink in a little, he dealt the smokes across the bar and said “sounds like you’re thinking of a rutabaga.”

We were, indeed, thinking of a rutabaga. From then on, Mobil stations became Oracular, in my book.

Until this barman, on this night. When I told him the whole horror story of our fuckage, he spat back, with as much nonchalance and wisdom as the Delphitic Mobil Man, “you need a Salamander Heater. Just blow it on there for as long as it takes. It’ll cost you a little bit in propane, and that’ll be the end of it.”

And then.

I mean, and then, with a chorus of angels fading in an Ode to Joy as the halo took shape behind his wondrous long grey biker mane, “If you want to swing by tomorrow morning, you can borrow mine.”

And lo, the Salamander Heater was borrowed, and blown, and the afternoon update emailed from Cooter Hollow while I toiled away in internetland read Water is beginning to flow out of the tank drain. This might work. . At which point I requested photographic evidence that I might share with you. Which was met with the following by way of response:

I’ll do the nasty work. You blabber about it. Sounds like a deal to me. 

An unfrozen, wet, dirty deal, but a deal nonetheless.