My wife and I bought a new home recently.
Then, last week, my pipes tried to freeze, but they underestimated me, because they don’t know my struggle.
I’ve been fighting pipes since the rats. And this place doesn’t even have rats, so how could they possibly win?
Allow me to explain.
Our home is really a three-unit apartment building. The plan was that we would have the two tenants cover the mortgage and we would be geniuses, but the reality is that the rent for our one tenant is way undermarket and the other tenant moved out not long after we bought it, leaving us with a vacant apartment in the middle of a Chicago winter.
And now I have to shovel snow and salt walkways and get calls late at night about dripping faucets and argue with my tenant because she wants to pay her rent in cash and complain about the noise of the renovations being made to the vacant apartment that would actually make being a landlord worthwhile.
Last week, the temperatures plummeted to 23 degrees below zero. And for those of you that live where it gets cold enough to wonder, no, that’s not with windchill — that was the actual air temperature.
I’m a Chicagoan, so I understand winter. I was born in it. Bred in it. And I know how to prepare for it. So I fill the gas tanks. I buy the rock salt. I keep a shovel in the car. I stock up on groceries.
I also know that I have to keep the water pipes in the basement from freezing. This is a task made extra hard because my basement is both unheated and poorly insulated.
But I know from hard experience the risk of failure. When I was a kid, the pipes in our home froze and burst. How did it happen? Well, a lot of the time, we could barely afford to heat the main part of the house. So the basement was sometimes not heated at all. Combine that with a cold snap and…
So first came the cold. Then no water would come out of the faucets. A couple of days later, the weather warmed up to above freezing. And then came a hissing noise from the basement.
As the oldest child, my mother sent me to investigate.
I hated that damn basement. It was poorly lit, unfinished, and gloomy. But I mostly hated it for the rats.
In the 1980’s, Chicago went through a terrible rodent infestation. Many of the rats were so big that they were called “Super Rats”. There were literally millions of them. They spent the early 80’s nibbling the toes of babies and jumping out of kitchen cabinets and rendering homes uninhabitable. At our house, they spent a lot of time running around in the basement.
And they were on on tv nearly every night. I remember watching a news broadcast that attempted to explain stories of rats found swimming in toilets in high-rise buildings. They brought in a ratologist*, set up a series of water-filled glass pipes and plopped a big rat in one end. The rat then swam through the glass pipes, holding its breath for what seemed like minutes, only to emerge in a glass toilet bowl on the other side. It was terrifying. Chicagoans were afraid to do Number Two in the dark for years after.
My mother hired our neighbor to set traps in the basement. The traps were as huge as the rats — the size of paperback books — and baited with a mixture of peanut butter and Cheez Whiz. Several times a night, I’d hear them snap shut like someone dropping an encyclopedia on a table. This went on for months.
Anyway, I eventually made my way to the basement to learn that the hissing was water being forced through the cracks and splits in our now thawing lead pipes. Half of the basement looked like a water park. Water was dripping, sprinkling, and spraying everywhere. I have no idea how my mother paid to have the pipes replaced. Just that it took us a long time to recover from the bill.
I’m no longer a child. I’m no longer broke. Mostly. But I know that even now I cannot afford to have the pipes in my basement burst. Why, the inconvenience alone! So I shake my fist at the sky and its coming Polar Vortex and appeal to the gods of credit for help.
I then go and buy a heater.
And other than a hot tub that froze up in the master bath, we survived.
It’s a different world.
*Not an actual title..
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Previously Published on Medium
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