Pioneer living

Chapter 1:
Last Friday my idiot tenant took a quick dump and dashed out the door, in a big, important hurry. It was not until late that afternoon, after the soaking rain started, that I went to rinse out a milk bottle in the kitchen sink and nothing emerged from the tap but a mournful sigh.  
I looked up at the ceiling light to confirm that there was electricity.  There was.
I turned on the hot water tap to make sure that the problem was not a matter of mice getting into the cold water line and blocking it up, but this did not appear to be the case. I tried the upstairs tap just to leave no stone unturned and to postpone the moment when I would have to accept the reality that Something was Wrong at the Well.
Meanwhile the idiot tenant had returned home and was upset that the water was not flowing. Upon intense questioning, he claimed that his water usage was, if anything, less than normal, no hoses left on.  No 2-hour showers. No laundries since Monday.
Had this been a bright dry afternoon, with cheerful birdsong and scent of newmown hay, I would have gone down the hill to the Other House, occupied by the idiot tenant and as close as possible to the well, thrashed my way through the bramble and goldenrod jungle, over the stumps and half-buried barbed wire, and so to the well house and looked in.  Unhappily, it was not such a day.  It was cold and miserable and had been raining for an hour with increasing intensity. Furthermore, Spafford & Sons had been here not 3 weeks previous to install a new pump, the old one having fried itself, so I opted to assume the Aggrieved Customer hat and phoned them, implying that the problem could only be their faulty pump.  
So it was that John, the representative of Spafford & Sons who had drawn the short straw, swaddled in wet weather gear, arrived and slogged out to the Scene of the Disaster, and discovered that the pump was fine, but the well was empty.  To ensure that this brand new pump did not follow the trend set by its predecessor, he turned off the power and went for a Meaningful Dialogue with the idiot tenant.  It did not take long to discover that the idiot tenant, in his hasty dash for the door had left the toilet running resulting in the entire contents of the well being relocated into the septic tank serving the Other House.
What happens, among other things, when the pump stops working is that all the water in the 520’ pipe that connects my kitchen sink to that muddy hole in the ground starts heading back from whence it sprang, loosening, along the way, all the sediment, clay, humus, mouse hair, insect parts, that have achieved a stable foothold in the pipe, but only in a north-bound current.  Thus when the pump is finally operational once again, what emerges from my taps is all the newly dislodged accumulation amounting to a thick, dark brown sludge looking a lot like the material that the honey dipper sucked out of my septic tank last year, mercifully without the aroma.
Chapter 2.
So it was, in the gathering dusk of that dreary Friday, that I scanned the kitchenscape with the unhappy realization that there would be nothing coming out of the taps that could be used for washing, much less ingestion, for 3 or 4 days.
Luckily my rain barrels were full so I got a couple of buckets out of the greenhouse and rinsed out the potting soil and dead wasps and filled them full of pretty clean water with only a few globs of algae and small sticks.  While dragging these back up to the house I got a Little House on the Prairie feeling of gritty self-sufficiency in the face of the hostile elements.
Once back to the kitchen I rinsed the larger chunks of spaghetti sauce out of the dutch oven using the effluent that spluttered out of the tap and then filled it with the nice clean bucket water which I heated on the stove.  The dishwashing process, once I had adjusted the water temperature down from Scald to Yikes with a few scoops out of the bucket, went surprisingly smoothly in spite of the almost insurmountable instinct to turn on the tap, but finally I had the several days worth of dishes cleared off all surfaces, and escaped spaghetti sauce scraped off the counter.
I really wanted a shower, but did not feel this would be a good idea, so instead spent the evening watching drivel on my single reliable TV channel, and so to bed after a very sketchy sponge bath in Perrier water, followed by a quick pee flushed away with dark chocolate water.
The Very Next Day I ran into Shaw’s and got a 2 ½ gallon jug of Poland Spring’s finest.  I celebrated the presence of this much clean water in the place by having spaghetti for supper.  
During the afternoon I could have sworn that I could see the bottom of the toilet when I flushed it. I tried it several times to convince myself.  Maybe.
But now I really felt the need for a shower.  I considered going to motel, or turning up at somebody’s door dressed in a towel and a desperate expression, but in the end I just went back to the rain barrel, visions of Laura Ingalls Wilder beating laundry on the rocks.  The main disadvantage of bathing in the sink is that the only part of you that gets to be warm is the part that is actually in the sink.  Everything else is a shivering wasteland of duck bumps, but it does most certainly feel good when it’s over.
By Sunday afternoon I could definitely see the bottom of the toilet, so I went downstairs and ran water into the washing machine, which has a white enamel tub. The holes nearly disappeared when the water was maybe 6” deep.  After draining this out and refilling, the holes were definitely visible in 8” of water.  On the third try the color changed from tea to urine.  Not wishing to drain the well yet again, I suspended my experiments for the time being.
However by Sunday evening, after many flushes – I was beginning to understand that compulsive cat in the viral video – the water was very nearly water colored, and so it came to pass that on Monday morning I added a bunch of foul-smelling laundry to a tub whose color I would describe as “light urine” and washed it.
And that very evening inserted myself in a long overdue shower, and while hosing the shampoo out of my eyes, vaguely wondered at the state of mind of people willing to heave themselves into an ox-drawn wagon and head for Montana with not a single bottle of Perrier.