The Mechanic's Daughter

The Mechanic's Daughter Part 18: Follow the water

Nikki and I often found reasons not to attend Barbara's Thursday night women's group. It was too much to think all the time about fighting injustice and the odds stacked against us as women. Sometimes we just wanted to sit and gab about things that weren't so serious. We went to the movies. We went for pizza.

Nikki was curious about Andrew and had asked me to point him out at school. "Oh, he's very good-looking. You deserve someone nice," she told me as we shared a vegetarian pizza.

"I don't know that he's nice. Just wants my attention. He calls every Wednesday to plan the weekend. He keeps wanting me to stay overnight, but I don't know."

"Oh, that sounds good. It seems to me I spent the last few years dying for male attention."

"Marion thinks I shouldn't settle so quickly. She says that's the point of dating, to try out different men." I took a second slice and bit into it.

"But you like him. You keep going back."

I nodded, my mouth full.

"I wonder if I'll ever date again," Nikki said wistfully.

"Of course, you will! Stop thinking about it and someone will turn up."

"I'm not pretty and confident like you."

"What are you talking about? I'm no prettier than you and I'm far from confident. I'm not like Barbara."

It's like Barbara is the litmus test against which we measure ourselves. Barbara's confidence, her determination to take on something bigger than herself, her relentless self-improvement. It wasn't a standard we'd ever match up to. She has already arranged the self-defence course; she's still haranguing the administration about safety on campus; she has plans to start a rape crisis centre. We're in the gravity of a very powerful orbit.

One evening Nikki came home to dinner with me. Mom was uneasy with not knowing where I was every minute. She demanded an account of every date, she wanted to know why I was so involved with Barbara's movement. But she probably didn't have Nikki in mind when she told me she wanted me to invite my friends to dinner. The person she really wanted to meet was Andrew, but I told her I didn't want to give him the wrong idea.

"What do you mean by that?" She looked annoyed.

"You know. Come home, meet the folks. It sounds as if I want to marry him."

"And you don't?"

"I have no intention of marrying yet. I've got school and then I want to work."

She was impatient with this plan – she'd gone from her father's home straight to her life with my Dad. She thought if I was spending time with Andrew, I should treat it more seriously. But I was aware he'd go off to law school in a year or two and he probably wouldn't think twice about moving on. Besides, Jimmy was frequently gone overnight with Marlene and Mom wasn't pushing to meet his girlfriend.

"You should meet Nikki. I spend more time with her than I do with Andrew."

Mom loved her. Nikki exclaimed over the size of the garden, standing at the back door and looking out over the expanse of snow. Mom told her about the vegetables she planted every year and Nikki appeared to eat that up. For dessert, we had a strawberry-rhubarb pie, made with last year's fruit, which Mom had frozen, and Nikki gobbled that up as well.

Nikki asked about life in the country, saying she'd always wanted to live outside the city, something she'd never told me. Mom told her about buying the house here, next to the garage and how rough it was in the early days, until Dad rented a backhoe and dug a full basement, then put the house back on its blocks. His war buddy, Wilf, who worked in construction, had helped. We had well water then, supplemented by a huge rain barrel on the outside of the house. Mom used to put the old wringer washer out in the yard to do the wash. There was barely enough pressure in the house to run water for cooking. Dad had to redo the pipes the following year, tapping into an artesian well that ran somewhere deep under our property.

I knew all these stories, but hearing them now, I began to think about that well again.

Finally, Nikki offered to help with the dishes, so I washed while she dried. The next day she sent a thank you note for the dinner.

"What a lovely girl," my mother said. "I'm glad you have such a nice friend. She's welcome any time."

I went to my room and made plans for my final assignment in hydrography. I would peel back a layer on the life my family has led through the story of our water, tracing through public records and lab tests how our first well became contaminated and why the water smelled of sulphur.

The Grosiliers next door didn't have the money to sink a new well. They still boiled their water, but that didn't get rid of the smell. I asked Mrs. Grosilier if I could take a sample. I did some simple tests in the school lab, discovering e. coli, high phosphate levels. Then I sent the water to the public lab, to measure lead, mercury and other contaminants. I drove the miles on either side of our homes, mapping where the water comes from. It was not hard to find the landfill where once there was farmland, the quarries along the escarpment. These were ground water killers.

At the public lab, I asked for the old records, as the well water was tested annually. I could pinpoint when the clouding and silting in local wells began and when the water was declared unfit to drink. The county archives showed when the landfill opened, but the landowner probably had been dumping illegally before that time. I pored through old farm publications to find out what agricultural chemicals were in use. The geology of the area was straightforward – a bed of gravel two hundred feet thick extending to the lip of the escarpment. And water could always be counted on to move downhill.

Perhaps my conclusion was a little less than scientific, a little angry. I wondered who kept track of the outbreaks of disease that can be traced to polluted ground water. The infection that led to Jimmy's tonsils being pulled. Who counted the cost to families like mine and the Grosiliers and countless others of polluted water? Or was it invisible because in the real world, we were invisible, just people who worked and paid for what's necessary and got by? These big questions overwhelmed me with their significance. I talked to Andrew, but his politics failed to answer it, nor did feminism give me any guidance. Instead I dropped by the farm to talk to Moira, who loved the land as much as I did, and watched her new baby sleep in a sunny spot on the smooth pine boards of her home.