My Little House on the Prairie

“Don't it always seem to go. That you don't know what you've got. Till it's gone?”

That lyric has become such a cliche in my life. As I go through the changes life brings me, that chorus sort of just hangs around me, getting louder and louder whenever I lose something. It gets sort of depressing, but like all cliches, its bite has been defanged for the most part. Nowadays, I only really think about not appreciating things while I have them when I get some new sort of physical ailment. Especially canker-sores. I fall into this haze of accepting this new condition, and almost forgetting how life was before. It is like a new roommate, or a new co-worker, whether I like it or not, I’m stuck now. Then when it goes away, I get this initial rush of joy, but then I just go back to normal, like nothing ever happened. One day I am coughing up phealm and have headaches, the next day I am perfectly fine, and I just keep going. Sometimes I think that my body just has a normal mode, and an ad-normal mode, and when anything goes wrong, I switch just to cope with the situation. The modes never meet, they just sort of compartmentalize the troubles and give this sense of normalcy no matter the situation. The “modes” give a sense of continuation, a sense that I am just going forward and any abnormalities are just part of the journey. The problem then becomes I don’t learn anything from it. Sometimes though, there are situations so dire that you can’t help but learn a little bit about the world.

In the month of January, I was dealing with having no running water in my apartment. To be honest, it is a little hard for me to give an exact timeline, or an exact length of time. When I lost my water, it wasn`t about planning out my week and looking forward to things, it was about living from day to day, trying to figure out what I need to do to make my life a little more livable.

I live in the middle of the country Japan. Japan, the land of vending machines, cell phones, and cramped spaces, but I just happen to live in just the right mix of long dark roads with nothing on them, dodgy cell phone reception at best, and vistas of unoccupied wilderness as far as the eye can see. A perfect vacation spot for those tired of the busy-body city life, but not exactly what a native English suburb boy is prepared for. When I first came here, all I could really think of is how many mountains there are and if I have ever seen so money mountains in the some place area before.

So, with mountains, usually comes cold. Lots and lots of cold. Cold and snow. Which, to be honest, I usually don’t have a problem with. I came from a suburb of Chicago, the land of two seasons: winter and road construction. The only reason road construction stops during winter is because there is way too much snow to be productive. The country of Japan actually gets less snow than the White City (especially this year) but the difference lies in insulation. Japan is also a land of paper doors, which is to say, with all the earthquakes, typhoons, and other weather phenomena, it is just not in the Japanese building practices to build buildings with a lot of insulation. Japanese people have gotten used to this with reliance on stoves and air conditioners that also spew heat, but as a foreigner, these conditions were not exactly welcoming. There are times at work where I am stuck in one room because the rest of the building is much too cold to go without a coat on. In my 3rd year, I have gotten a much thicker skin about the luck of central heat, but it is in my apartment that I begin to break down.

My first year here, I relied mostly on too many blankets and laying in my bed for warmth. As I have gotten my bearings, I now have an electric blanket, a mini heater, and of course the aforementioned dual purpose air conditioner (which not only cools and heats air, but can dry clothes it you put them near enough, but suppose the same goes with a stove, one would be advised to be careful with that sort of thing). But even with all that warmth technology, I was on the edge. If one piece of the puzzle falls apart, it becomes less of a home and more of a cold trap. So when my running water stopped, it almost felt like a nightmare.

It is a weird feeling when you turn on a faucet and nothing comes out. I almost felt like maybe I somehow turned the facet on wrong and there is a weird trick I need to “unlock” the flowing water. I tried jingle and jangling it, but nothing. I tried the bathroom, nothing. Then the bathroom; surely the toilet is fine right? I flushed the toilet and found to my horror that it wasn’t filling back up. My apartment began to feel like a shack; just a place I put stuff in, not really one that I live in anymore. The only water I had left is the water left in my Brita filter. It became like the oasis in the cold desert of my home.

At first I wasn’t sure what to do. I kept hoping that it was a one day thing and once the weather got above freezing that it would just come back. I figured the water was just frozen or something and that all I had to do was wait. I waited two days and nothing happened. I began having to go to public baths and buy more prepared foods. I began to get depressed, how could I possibly live my 1st world lifestyle with no running water?

Then I remembered something. I began to remember books like Hatchet and Robinson Caruso. As fascinating as those books are on their own, what always hooked me into those books was trying to imagine how I would react to being transplanted in an environment where I would have to work hard just to survive. Granted my situation was really nothing like those (it is even hard to draw comparisons since I still had electricity) but then it dawned on me: this is My Little House on the Prairie! The much loved book turned TV series has been a mainstay in my life since I read the book in elementary school and still had a place in my heart. My sad situation became an opportunity for adventure.

First, the key was to figure out how the heck to a get water. While my running water wasn’t working, I lived right near a river. I daydreamed of getting buckets and a pole and carrying the buckets like they people used to (still do?), but this became rather impractical as it was extremely cold outside and I had no real buckets. I searched my apartment and all I found was a huge empty gas canister (also a full one which I am still not quite sure what I am supposed to do with it, get a gas oven?). My first plan was to just go down to the river and get water. The gas canister proved to be too unwieldy for walking back and forth, so decided to just drive myself over there. Not exactly reflective of my “dire straits fantasy” I was conjuring in my head, but that is the difference between fantasy and actually getting something done; you have to use all the tools available to you.

The problem was that it was hard to get my car super close to the river, and problem two is that I sort of became embarrassed. Having to maybe face my neighbors as I was stumbling and out of breath just seemed embarrassing. The romantic idea of carrying water from river to home started to dissolve as I was getting closer and closer to execution. I walked the river side to see if I could find a good access point. I was driving down and when I pass my work place, I saw that by the side of the building there was a hose. “Jackpot!” I thought to myself (well it was a bit more profane than that, but joyous nevertheless). I ran to my supervisor to ask if I could use it. Granted, I don’t think getting water from a hose was necessarily something the Ingalls could have relied on, but there was a sense of discovery that I just don’t experience very often in everyday life.

So I brought my gas canister and empty water bottles I bought the days before and already used from the convenience store, and filled them all. I packed them into my car trunk and got this feeling of really accomplishing something. I saw the problem, and now I was fixing it. I got my gallons and gallons of hose water and brought them to my apartment to use. I had three missions: 1.) clean the dishes for they were all dirty 2.) refill the toilet and 3.) use the water to make dinner. As I started to wash the dishes, I began to realize just how much water I use on a everyday basis. I had to use a quarter of a big bottle of water just to clean a small dish! What really floored me was when I began to refill the toilet (which became a much higher priority when I realised what could happen when you use a toilet without being able to flush) and flush it in for the first time in a while. I had to use half the huge gas canister for one good flush! I could not believe how much water the toilet alone takes up. It almost boggled my mind. As I was doing my chores and saw all the water I had to carry up to my third floor apartment whittle away, I began to realize just how much water I use on a daily basis. It is something that I probably could have reasoned out and thought little of before this incident, but having all my hard earned water go down the drain (sometimes quite literally) made an impression on me.

More than just water use, I began to get an insight into what people did before books, movies, and video games. They were not just sitting around being bored, they had to earn every single resource they relied on, and that takes time. Going time and time again to the hose, filling up the bottles, and doing things I needed to get prepped for sleep and work the next day, sucked up all my free time. It was go to work, work to get my water in order, do chores, and the only rest I got was when I finally got to bed late that evening. In a way it was very satisfying, but I was losing a sense of comfort and joy that I enjoy in my admittedly cushy lifestyle. When I finally talked to my supervisor and got my co-workers to come over and help fix the water, I was rather relieved that they could fix everything (they even magically fixed my TV somehow, even though they never touched it, I just turned it on after they fixed my water and it suddenly worked again) but I felt like a part of my life was moving away from me. I wasn’t the woodsman anymore, I was just the normal guy with nothing to do anymore. I felt a odd sense of loss, but with it, came a lesson of understanding. Though it may be only a little bit, I feel like I understand how to live life a little better now.

And isn’t that what living is all about?