The sunshine was my first clue that something was wrong.
Normally, I have nothing against sunshine per-se, but the fact that I was woken up by
sunlight in my face was disturbing for two reasons:
For one thing, it was a bit of a shock to have any sunshine at all. I'd fallen asleep to the
crashing of thunder, howling wind and immense flashes of lightning. My bedroom
window looked out onto Mount Monadnock and it had looked like something out of
Fantasia. I'm a big fan of storms and had really enjoyed it. I like early-morning sunlight
too, but to go from the one to the other in (apparently) the blink of an eye was vaguely
disconcerting - a sort of meteorological whiplash.
For another thing - why was I being woken up by sunlight? I struggled with the bedclothes
and eventually mastered the task of sitting up. I blinked my eyes several times and tried to
focus on my alarm clock across the room, half expecting to see it the ominous red blinking
of "12:00, 12:00, 12:00... But instead, I saw nothing - a blank face.
"Oh, no.... Don't tell me..."
A quick glance at the watch on my desk reassured me that I wasn't as late for work as I'd
feared, but that wasn't my main concern. With dread in my heart, I plodded down the
hallway to the bathroom, where my worst fears were confirmed. Turning the tap open
produced a quick spurt of water, which quickly dwindled to a trickle and then died away
completely. A shower was obviously out of the question.
Anybody who lives in the countryside and gets their water from a well can tell you that a
power failure doesn't just mean an loss of electricity - it means no water.
I was late for work and desperately needed a shower. I looked at the toilet briefly and
toyed with the idea of taking enough water for a sponge-bath out of the tank, but
reconsidered quickly. Aside from any aesthetic considerations, a tankful of water would
leave me just enough for one flush and - no more - until the power went back on - it was
not a resource to be squandered. (It's important in a crisis like this to keep a firm grip on
one's priorities.)
As the saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures. Grabbing a towel and
bottle of shampoo, I jogged down the stairs, out the back door and down the hill behind
the house to an old farm pond that was left over from when the property had been an old
farm.
Like many old ponds of this type, this one hadn't been dredged for many years and was in
the process of slowly disappearing. As I worked my way gingerly into the water, I sank up
to my ankles in the fine silt that lay on the bottom. Slowly and gingerly - being careful not
to stir up the water - I worked my way in as far as my waist and eased the top from the
shampoo bottle.
It was when I was completely covered with lather that it happened.
You may be familiar with the sensation of swimming in a pond or a lake and being nibbled
at by small fish. It's a natural and even a fun aspect of the experience. It had happened to
me dozens of times over the years. And yet, I was unprepared when the fish that lived in
this pond bit me. To judge by the strength of its bite, it was not a small fish - somewhere
between the size of a large-mouth bass and a blue marlin - but the truly shocking thing was
not so much how hard it bit me as it was WHERE it bit me. It was in a truly surprising
place, not at all the place one expects to be bitten by a fish - indeed, not the sort of place
one would expect a fish to bite even another fish outside the bonds of matrimony.
To say that I hurried out of the water would be understating the case. I'm sure it couldn't
really have happened in this way, but I have the distinct memory of turning around and
watching the trough of water that my sudden exit had left, collapsing back on itself like the
Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.
Unfortunately, I was left in a predicament that would have challenged Charlton Heston
himself. I was late for work and covered with soapy lather, with no water available except
the pond in front of me which was - apparently - filled with deviant, carnivorous fish.
Ultimately, I didn't really have a choice - I really did need to get to work and that involved
going back into the water to rinse off. I can only blame my sense of panic for the flawed
strategy of jumping back into the water in a sort of a "cannonball" intended to frighten
away the fish. This, of course, left me covered from head to toe in black, silty mud.
The elaborate, jerky set of contortions that I went through in the next thirty seconds or so
in order to wash myself off as quickly as possible, I have since referred to as my Fish
Dance. Thirty-ONE seconds later I stood panting on the shore, glaring at the murky water,
and the fish I imagined there, laughing himself silly.
Grumbling, swearing and now thoroughly awake, I put my pajamas back on and stomped
my way back up to the house with one thought in mind: conservation be damned - I was
going to use my flush.
