on becoming a conspiracy theorist

We were all fairly smart guys enjoying an afternoon in the country, a project, and tools both owned and borrowed, but by dusk we had become conspiracy theorists.

Mike and Emily bought a run-down cabin in the woods a year ago, and Mike has been working towards getting water to the cabin for months. When Denise and I arrived last week to see the place, Mike was about to turn on the power to the well for the first time. “It’s always good to have your friends show up just as you’re about to see if your work was right,” I said.

Then even more friends showed up. Joe and Amy arrived. Now Mike had a crowd watching.

He flipped the breaker and the pump switched on. Water came out of a hose, which is success at one level. But something wasn’t right.

This is a rural setting. It’s not a city street with water mains buried along the street with tangents leading to every house. If you want water, you dig a well, install a pump, and run pipe to your house and outside faucets. It’s not a Jack and Jill type well – an electric pump does the work. There is a switch monitoring pressure in the system that turns on the pump when pressure gets too low, and then cuts off when it reaches its happy place.

Mike’s switch kept turning on and off like a jackhammer. Water was coming out of a hose all right, but the switch and pump shouldn’t cycle so quickly.

Our system is like this, too. Mike asked how much I knew, and I admitted that I don’t think about it until I have to every couple of years when there is a problem and I need to re-learn everything, and that a couple of those years had passed.

But I did know the importance of the water pressure tank, which looks like a hot water heater but instead has the job of holding a certain amount of pressure in an air bladder that acts as a sort of counterweight to the rest of the pressure in the system. You don’t want your pump on all the time to hold pressure up. That would burn out the pump and uses electricity. Water in a pipe doesn’t compress, but air in a bladder does. That’s how a system holds pressure when the pump isn’t switched on. What exactly the pressure in the tank should be is one of the things that is forgotten in those couple of years.

None of us were there for a workday. We were there to go for a walk in the woods. But a project is a project, and weighs on the mind until it’s done. I told Mike I’d think about it on the hike.

Their 30 acres are in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, just on the other side of Cherokee County from our place, 12 miles away as the crow flies, but 25 miles and 53 minutes by bumpy county roads. We hiked down a ravine and up the other side, led by Emily and Mike’s 10-year-old daughter who was understandably not attuned to the scrambling abilities of her parents’ friends. Emily pointed out damage from a tornado. Dozens of large trees had been blown over before they bought the land. Bryant Creek was just out of sight down a steep hillside. Joe, a forester and woodworker, told us about the trees we were walking amongst. Amy, a biologist, couldn’t pass a lichen without stopping to inspect.

Mike and I were playing along nicely, but we were really thinking about his well.

At the end of the hike, Joe laid out several oak leaves he’d gathered and tested Emily on her knowledge of the different species, which I was impressed by, but I had other things on my mind.

I said to Mike, “It’s your pressure tank. Something isn’t right.”

We inspected it as the 10-year-old first gathered rocks to make a fire circle, and then twigs and dry wood to burn on a late autumn afternoon. After a few attempts she got a fire going and folks gathered around. Mike and I kept looking at each other. We wanted to solve this.

We checked the pressure in the water tank, the same way you check tire pressure. It read 20 pounds. Mike’s pressure switch was set to 20 pounds, too. So far, so good, or so we thought. But we didn’t think water was going in the tank. It was all coming out the hose. The tank wasn’t able to do its job of acting as a pressure counterbalance with nothing in it.

One of us, and I don’t know who, possibly because it was me and I’ve blocked responsibility for what came next from my conscience, suggested that maybe there was a protective plug that hadn’t been removed where the tank connected to the rest of the pipe. That would block water from entering the tank. Seemed reasonable. You see those little plugs in things and remove them before use.

By the way, anyone experienced with well systems has stopped reading because they saw what the problem was, if not immediately, then certainly by the second to last paragraph just now.

Mike huffed a bit but undid all of his work, removing electrical wires from the switch and loosening pipe fittings so that we could wrestle the tank outside the little wellhouse for inspection. There was a 90 degree elbow at the bottom of the tank, and reaching inside of it revealed a little plastic…something. It seemed to be an obstruction.

“That’s the problem,” someone said. I don’t know who, and I don’t want to know. By now, Joe had joined us, as had a neighbor, Stan. Four guys staring at a water tank.

We decided to take the 90 degree elbow off so we could remove the obstruction. But we couldn’t make it budge. Stan fetched bigger wrenches and a can of ‘knock’er loose’ which is what I will now forever call penetrating oil, to loosen up the threads. No amount of force made the elbow budge. The tank was on its side up against a 2x6 with Mike lying over it to keep it from turning as I supported Joe while he stepped on a plumber’s wrench with all of his weight. Nothing. Stan suggested that the elbow had been cross threaded on the tank, making it impossible to undo.

That’s when we went full conspiracy.

Someone, and I don’t recall who, stepped off the deep end. “I bet some knucklehead bought this tank, didn’t notice the plug, cross threaded the elbow on there, because we’ve already established they didn’t know what they were doing by not noticing the plug, tried to undo it, failed just like we did, and took it back to the hardware store where it went back on the shelf. Then Mike bought it and here we are.”

“Well, this isn’t getting done today, not with a bad tank,” someone said.

We joined the others at the fire and recounted our findings with Sherlockian certainty. It was so obvious. Emily listened and went, “Huh,” which can mean either “I’m impressed” or “I’m not so sure about this but I’ll refrain from saying more until I further understand.”

The next day, Mike took the tank back to the hardware store, explained what we thought was going on, and the guys there thought he was onto something. They checked other tanks, but all the other tanks had the same setup. An elbow with a little plug inside.

Then, finally, someone who knew what he was talking about said, “It’s not a plug. It’s a valve. It’s supposed to be there. How much pressure is in your tank?”

“20 pounds” Mike said.

“And what low pressure should it turn on at?”

“20”

“Well, why would water break through that valve if there is equal pressure on both sides? You need a little less pressure in the tank. Set it to 18. Then the tank will fill and act as a counterbalance.”

That was it.

There was no knucklehead who had bought the tank before Mike and screwed it up. There were, however, four knuckleheads standing around Mike’s wellhouse on a December afternoon not knowing what they were doing and inventing fantastic scenarios to explain their failure rather than figuring something out correctly.

When Mike told me what he had learned at the hardware store, and that we had been so close to getting it right but went down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole instead, I sort of hoped that he had told Emily that, yep, he’d been sold a bum tank and everything was fine now with a correct one, but Emily and Mike don’t operate like that.

It may be another two years before something goes wrong with our system, but I think I will remember better now.