Something
didn’t sound right.
Turning away
from the sink, I saw that the toilet had flushed but now was filling with
water. I lifted the lid, took a closer
look, and panicked. Hastily setting the
tank lid on the floor, I watched the inexorable rise of water, almost to the
rim now.
I took a
guess and pulled up the chain. Wrong
move. The water became a fountain,
spilling over the brim, cascading onto the tiled floor, following gravity down
the two inch lip between half bath and bedroom floor. I immediately dropped the chain, but the
water kept coming. What to do? What to do?
A long-unused
bit of information found its way to my shrieking brain, and I reached behind
the chain to pull up the float. The
fountain ceased, but the spilled water kept its quick course into my bedroom on
those beautiful hardwood floors. I let
go of the float; the flood renewed. I
grabbed the float and tried to think.
Clearly I needed help. Hoping to
wake my son at the other end of the house, I hollered as loud as my
post-bronchitis voice would allow but to no avail.
There I
stood in a good half inch of water, watching it fan out into the bedroom. What to do?
And then I
remembered the water turn-off valve, you know, the one at the back of the
toilet. I thought back to my
garden-watering days on Whidbey Island and my brother’s words: “Righty, tighty; lefty, loosey.” Maintaining my death grip on the float with
my right hand, I bent down to turn the valve to the right with my left
hand. I turned and turned and turned and
finally it was off. Gingerly, I let go
the float and nothing happened.
I had
already slid the throw rug to the bathroom threshold and tossed my bathrobe on
the bedroom floor. Now I raced to the hall closet for towels to mop up the
mess. As I cleaned up the lake under my
bed, I noted that it had been a long time since a dust mop had visited those
nether regions. Once the hardwood was
dry, I made quick work of the bathroom floor.
And then I called the plumber.
Five hours
and $120 dollars later, I started a load of sopping wet towels in the washer
and counted my blessings, the chief of which was that the toilet had flushed
completely before it became a fountain.
