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jjhbowers · 9 years ago

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Ever since I had taken little three year old Jordie on our “walkabout”, which ended up with us getting a ride home from Chicago in a police car, I believe he took my advice with a large grain of salt. He was still a good little brother, and we enjoyed playing and doing things together, but I believe he began to march to the beat of a different drummer. A drummer that didn’t do things like break his parents’ record, or lead him into trouble by getting them both lost in the city!

One day, after I had retired from the Kachuda post office, he sent me a text on the phone:

“The Algoma town clerk called my employer today, and said that my house there had used 173,000 gallons of water, and so they had shut off the water!”

This was in the heart of a Wisconsin winter, January in fact, and we had been experiencing bone-chilling temps in the sub-zero levels of cold. My heart sank, and I texted him back in Illinois immediately:

“Jordie- this is an emergency! You need to get up to Algoma and assess the damages!”

After a long while, he finally texted me back. I knew he was listening to whatever other person he had adopted as a more reliable big brother, and discounted my tempestuous, highly strung nature.

“Oh Jess, I’m sure it’s just that new water meter the town put in. It’s probably just leaking, and of course it would all just go down the floor drain in the basement. No worries.”

No worries?? 173,000 gallons- I imagined Jordie’s cute little house, the basement a frozen swimming pool, and all the downstairs ruined by a flood of water, all frozen solid… I texted him again, saying that this was an emergency, and I would meet him there if he’d like, but he’d better either explain to his employer what the problem was, or he needed to just call in sick for a couple of days to attend to this. He responded with another short, succinct text that summed up his views of my leadership capabilities:

“Thorntons don’t call in sick!”

Early the next morning I was driving down to Algoma in near white-out conditions. I was pretty much the only car on those rural two lane roads that wound through the hills of rural Juneau county, and so I could pretty much take my own pace. I tend to drive slowly, and always have; I like to be safe, and also to enjoy my surroundings on the way to wherever I am going in this beautiful part of the country. But I couldn’t see much on this day!

I pulled up outside the Algoma town hall, which was also the police and fire station. Inside, sitting at his and her desks, were the mayor and the town clerk, which pretty much made up the executive branch.

“Couldn’t your brother make it up yet?” the mayor asked me after I had explained that I was Jordie’s brother, and that I had come down from Kachuda an hour north to look into things. The mayor seemed visibly surprised, as did the town clerk. I couldn’t very well tell them that ‘Thorntons don’t call in sick!’, and so I just shrugged, and told them I’d let them know what I found at the house.

Jordie’s house was a solid little cottage, with two floors and a large basement, built in the 1940’s. It also had a big two car garage, that Jordie had filled with assorted “manly treasures”, like a new tractor, snowblower, and lots of assorted junk. He had bought it on foreclosure from the bank, and got it for little more than the price of the land itself!

I decided to put my bags into the cabin next door at Wolf Acres, and so parked by the chain gate in front. It hadn’t been plowed out yet, and the snow was a couple of feet high, so I walked back the half mile or so from the road.

When I opened the door to the cabin, the destruction that greeted me almost stopped my heart- glass fragments were everywhere; in the kitchen, sprinkled over the big couch that dominated the large open room of the cabin, up in the loft, all over the appliances and counters, and even right up to the big stone fireplace that dominated the room!

Luckily, I had on heavy boots, and crunched my way over the piles of broken safety-glass to see that the large skylight above the kitchen, far up in the roof, had been smashed by a fallen tree that had penetrated the glass. A rather large log lay amidst the glass, and if this log could display emotion it would have radiated guilt!

After frantically calling my home insurance agent back in Kachuda, I began the cleanup. My agent had said to first make things safe, and this meant removing all of that glass. I began, so at least someone could walk around the cabin safely; and after a few hours at least I had the large mass of glass reduced to only thousands of sparkling little diamonds sprinkled around, glistening like the eyes of little demons in all directions.

The heat, miraculously, had held in the cabin, although the furnace had had to work mightily around the clock to keep the heat up above freezing with a giant hole in the roof! Finally, I rolled up the large green floor mat from in front of the sink, and so captured a lot of the pelletized glass within the roll. Taking that mat, I staggered out to the front porch and set it down there for later disposal. Then, I trudged back to the road, past my car on to Jordie’s place.

Forging my way through the high drifts of snow, I used the key he kept to his place in the cabin and opened the back door- at least there was no ice here, in the kitchen- and the electric lights worked. I turned on the light to the basement, and lo and behold it appeared pretty dry. Damp, but no frozen underground lake as I had feared. Maybe Jordie was right, it was one small leak in the water meter, and the floor drain had taken it all away!

Unfortunately, the thermometer in the kitchen showed that the furnace was not working, and it was quite cold in the house. A quick trip down to the basement showed me a damp floor, but it also showed me a furnace that was quite dead. One pipe had separated from it’s connection; perhaps that was the only problem, I hoped to myself.

I had made a number of calls then, first to a heating contractor, and then to carpenters in town. The heating guy, Dave, came over right away from the neighboring town of Kasota. I knew Dave from when he installed our cabin furnace all those years ago, and now he owned his own heating and plumbing business with his friend Jim. I fervently hoped I would not have to utilize Jim’s services…

The furnace had just been very poorly maintained for years, as Jim showed me as he cleaned out all the gunk in the oil filter, cleaned the nozzle and replaced the transformer. And the furnace worked again!

Saying a brief internal prayer to my guardian angel, I called the town hall. They said they’d send Shane right over to turn on the water to see if we’d broken more than one pipe. I also called Troy from over in Bonaire north of Algoma to take down the tree from the cabin roof.

These workmen were all a joy to work with; all had good attitudes, cheerful and more than willing to help out. Shane turned out to be a man who I remembered from when he was a kid who mowed my aunt and uncle Wolf’s yard in town. He agreed to come right out and cut the tree, along with a buddy who might be able to fix my skylight- things were looking up!

But when Shane turned on the water, he really turned on the water: it came gushing from a number of sources in a number of pipes. We turned it off at the main valve, and Dave the furnace guy looked at me and said wryly: “I’ll send Jim over tomorrow morning.” It appeared Jordie had a lot of frozen, broken pipe to deal with. Or, at least Jim and I did!

Going outside, I headed back to the cabin. Thank goodness, the man I had hired to plow the drive had come and gone, and now I could drive back to the cabin; and more importantly now the carpenter, and Troy the tree guy could drive back with their truck as well. I went back in to sweep and vacuum up yet more glass, and to start drying the moisture and snow from the wood floor as well. I put a big fan on the wood, to dry it faster.

The tree was taken down, and the carpenter with Troy said “That window frame is too mangled, you will need a whole new window.” After they consulted together, they both agreed and said, almost in unison “Jimmy Morris is your man!” Troy called him on his cell, and informed me that he would be over later to box up the hole in the roof until they could order me a new skylight. And so, I would be able to sleep in a contained, heated cabin tonight, since I needed to be here for Jordie’s plumber the next day.

Jim was a tall, garrolous man who had a small farm just outside of Algoma. Like me, he had moved here with his wife when they were young, to avoid living out his life in the city of Kenosha; he also had relatives he had visited when a boy in Algoma! We had even moved out of our respective cities and into the Driftless region in the same year.

I was his helper all day long, and learned a lot about plumbing, and the new PEX pipe which is replacing copper and PVC pipes everywhere. This pipe made our removal of broken sections and substituting it vastly easier to accomplish, and it wound up being most of Jordie’s basement piping! I called Shane directly, and he came right over.

Now, the plumbing and heating were operational once again- mission accomplished! I texted Jordie, asking him what his insurance agent had said.

“I e-mailed him about it.”

Even I was shocked! Who was this advisor Jordie had replaced his big brother with?

“NO JORDAN, YOU HAVE TO CALL THEM UP AND MAKE A CLAIM- THIS IS MANY THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HERE!!”

I waited anxiously for his reply, knowing how reluctant Jordie always was about using the telephone. Finally, my phone buzzed, and I looked down at the screen:

“I did it!”

I sincerely hoped he had. We all have our fears and dislikes, like heights or spiders. Jordie’s is talking, even when very young he sometimes wouldn’t talk, and my parents would then ask him ‘What would Beanie say?’, and then he would talk, as Beanie.

And suddenly, then I knew. Jordie’s new advisor, the ‘big brother’ who had replaced me, was Beanie.

Excerpt from Driftless Mailman, new upcoming book by Jess Thornton Ever since I had taken little three year old Jordie on our “walkabout”, which ended up with us getting a ride home from Chicago in a police car, I believe he took my advice with a large grain of salt.

#Driftless Mailman #driftless region of Wisconsin

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