newsminer.com

I wake abruptly to the feel of a hand shaking my shoulder and a low, worried voice in my ear. I’m used to our 4-year-old invading my sleep, but not the other adult in the house. Before I can complain, I notice the anxiety in my husband’s voice.

“Theresa, get up,” he says. Then more insistently, “Get up.”

I can smell something. A hint of “eau de burning” perfumes the air, but this is not a smoky kind of burn. It smells like a hot drink spilled on the carpet. I follow Mike around the corner, as he tosses the news back over his shoulder.

“We’ve got a leak.”

Those are dreaded words for a family trying to eke a modern living out of an environment currently locked in a deep freeze. Water in a building is never good, especially with the added danger of frozen pipes. Things run smoothly in this old house, as long as everything stays warm inside.

I mentally run through all the water sources in our house. Could it be the hot water tank? Or maybe something broken in the bathroom?

“It’s the heating system,” he says.

I reach the bottom of the stairs and as if to illustrate, step into an inch of water. The soggy carpet squishes uncomfortably beneath my stockinged feet.

We’re proud of this. Our heating system uses waste water from the Aurora Power Plant downtown that’s piped right by our house. A few years ago, workers dug a trench and installed a spur to connect the main supply to our house.

My husband and a team of volunteers got to work from the inside, our very own plumbers’ union. They retrofitted the existing system with a network of copper pipes, elbowed and diverted like an illustration by M.C. Escher.

The water flows through these pipes to a heat exchanger, which absorbs the warmth from the power plant water and transfers it into our own system. Then the liquid flows back outside — never mixing or mingling.

Now when the temperature plummets to 40 below, we’re the only house on the block without a chimney full of exhaust. Although none of that seems very compelling now that 180-degree water is spraying out of the main pipe.

This could be a scene from a sitcom. My husband’s hopping around in his pajamas with a leather chap surrounding his hand and a snowmachine helmet clamped down over his head, but we’re not laughing. He reaches out through the pumping water to turn off the valve.

In the time it takes for him to shut it down, I’ve compiled a list of alternative housing options. I know there are at least half a dozen people who would take us in on a moment’s notice.

When Mike and I were first dating, he wasn’t impressed by my lack of life savings. I told him I didn’t have much money, but I had a different kind of safety net. In a place like Fairbanks, we rely on an alternative economic system, one that compiles interest but doesn’t cost much in fees: friendship.

We live in a community where people start new families away from the generations of support they were born into. Here friends don’t just have your back when you’re looking for a date at the singles bar. Their loyalty is called into play in a hundred different ways.

Sometimes they’re staying with your sick son while you run to the grocery store to pick up a last minute prescription. Or trudging to your front door each day while you’re away, taking care of the plants and making sure all is well. They’re dropping you off at the airport at the crack of middle-of-the-night or soothing you through a stressful day.

They bring magazines and games to entertain after a surgery or get the first glimpse of a new baby all wrinkled and mottled, before the birth announcements go out in the mail.

As it happened, we didn’t need to tap into our survival system this time. Mike had the heating system back online before the temperature inside dropped below 60 degrees. He cleaned up the mess with the help of a Shop-Vac, a miracle worker at sucking gallons of water out of a saturated carpet.

We didn’t escape without paying a scattering of small bills. The humidity from all that boiling water left a telltale frosting on the window panes. And there’s still a faint stain on the floor, just like a flood mark. But so far there’s no evidence of mildew or any permanent damage to the furniture that was in the water’s path.

We were so lucky. And we’ve been meaning to rip the carpet out of the basement and install some tile anyway. If only we had a few friends to help.