Christmas Flow

     As I write this, there’s a steady rumbling hum coming from the street in front of my house. It’s the wrap up of some neighborhood excitement that has nothing to do with the holidays other than sprinkling a little more stress on them.  

     I spent most of Monday wrapping presents and stuffing packages to be mailed on the post office’s busiest day of the year. After hours spent wrestling with packing tape, foam peanuts, my computer and printer to print mailing labels, I came up for air and was finally loading the packages into my car to chase our mailman who usually comes around 4:00. That’s when I heard a soft, tentative knock on the front door.

     I barely cracked the front door to keep our pets inside. A city worker told me that there had been a major water main break on my street so they had closed the road in front of my house and turned off the water.

 

    When I fully opened the door, I saw the whole ugly panoramic picture—debris that made the street look like a dried riverbed, buckled asphalt, blinking workhorses blocking off two ends of our street, a sinkhole big enough to comfortably swallow a car, and yikes, Sarah’s car parked directly across the street, mere feet away, from the sinkhole!

Buckling road

     

Sinkhole when it was still small.

I fished her car keys out of our bowlful of keys and hustled out there to move her car into the safety of our driveway. When I asked one of the workers if he knew who called it in, he said that he didn’t know. He giggled a little and said it was like a geyser going off when they got there. I felt kind of stupid that something so big was going on right outside my door and I was totally unaware of it caught up in my package wrapping flurry.

     I abandoned my Christmas package mailing plans and shifted gears to “survival mode.” We had two cases of water bottles on hand for earthquake preparedness. Check! I squeaked my car out of the garage past Sarah’s car and followed the workers’ advice—hugged the curb on our side of the street because it was hollow under the other side, to park up the hill outside of the “danger zone.” Check! Then I texted John and Sarah the news and told them to plan around it. Check!

     It’s always a little shocking to realize how dependent we are on things we take for granted—like clean running water for drinking, cooking, cleaning and showering. It made me thankful that our electricity and gas were still up and running.

     That night, John and I went out for dinner to celebrate our 35^th anniversary, and then dropped the packages off at the post office. Afterwards, we parked up the hill just in front of the Road Closed sign and walked home past houses twinkling with Christmas lights.

   On the way, we saw the workers draining water from a fire hydrant and I asked them if that meant the water would be coming back on soon. They said it would be back on in the morning. The city would have to test the water to make sure it wasn’t contaminated with bacteria. We’d have to boil any water that we were going to consume until the tests came back on Wednesday.

    Back hoes, dump trucks and other massive equipment dug and moved asphalt and dirt around under intense lights so bright it looked like daytime. Men stood inside the sinkhole that was so deep we couldn’t see the tops of their hard hats. They worked until 11:00 that night. 

     Tuesday morning all was quiet except for the kids walking and gawking on their way to and from school.  The sinkhole was roughly filled in along with a second one that had caved in at our neighbors’ driveway across the street. The road right in front of our house had some deep ruts grooved into it from the dump trucks. Even though only six houses were directly affected, our street is a through street so it usually gets a fair amount of traffic. The quiet of the road being closed was kind of nice and it was entertaining watching a Fed Ex truck getting around the barricade.

     Yesterday, Wednesday, a cheer went up in our house when we got the notice that the water was safe to drink again. Hurray! No more brushing teeth with bottled water! Tap water never glistened so beautifully!

      This morning, Thursday, I was just going to take a sip of my tea made with filtered tap water when the rumbling and backup beeps of heavy equipment cracked the morning quiet. I threw on a pair of jeans and a jacket, and ran outside to wave down one of the construction workers who was wearing a UW sweatshirt, “Can I move my car out of here real quick before you get started?”

This is where Sarah's car is usually parked.

     He was really nice for a Husky (probably because he doesn’t know that I’m a WSU Coug) and said, “Sure!” Then he halted a massive asphalt melting machine hooked onto a 

dump truck and helped direct me backing up around it.

Road building in front of our driveway.

     My car’s parked around the corner now so I can get out of here if I need to, although there’s plenty of Christmas preparation work to do here at home.

    Mr. U-dub told me that it would probably take a few hours to get the job done. He lied. Friday we were hauling our garbage cans around the corner to be picked up and carefully weaving our way around the blinking work horses to get in and out of our driveway.

Obstacle course.

 

   Looks like that will be the routine at least until Monday. It’s going to look great and return our lives to normalcy when they’re finished. I can tell that they really have a sense of pride in what they’re doing. It’s an unexpected gift from the City of Puyallup.

Laura Keolanui Stark is looking for excuses to NOT do the things she SHOULD be doing for Christmas. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.