Thursday morning came with a hard wind out of the west and a low ceiling of clouds. I left before sunrise, carrying Dad's map, a flashlight, a camera, and enough food to last through a day I expected to spend on foot. Anna stood on the porch holding a thermos of coffee and told me not to get so absorbed in the search that I forgot to answer my phone. She had barely slept, and the rings under her eyes made me regret every year I had told her not to worry about the water business.
I began where the well discharge entered the main. The ground was still soft from a rain two nights earlier, and every low point along the right-of-way smelled of wet clay. I counted each valve box as I walked, checked its location against the handwritten measurements, and photographed the places where newer paving or landscaping made the route harder to follow. At the road crossing, a utility crew had installed a fiber conduit the previous winter, but their trench lay safely to one side of the water main. I marked it as checked and kept going.
You cannot trace an old buried utility by intuition alone. Things get moved, boxes sink, and the memory of a man who helped lay a pipe thirty years earlier can be both invaluable and imperfect. My father's map was accurate because he never trusted memory when a tape measure would settle a question. I followed his distances along the edge of Cedar Hollow, crossing the narrow strip of ground where the original easement ran beneath a line of sycamores. The map and the ground agreed for nearly three-quarters of a mile.
Then they stopped agreeing. Behind the clubhouse, where the grass was kept so short it looked like carpet, I found a rectangle of soil about twelve feet long and darker than the surrounding ground. Fresh sod had been laid over the center of it, but the edges had not knitted together. A boot print remained in one soft corner, and a discarded plastic fitting wrapper lay half hidden under a clump of ornamental grass. I stared at the ground for a full minute before reaching for my camera.
At first I thought the work might have been an unauthorized repair. A buried pipe had failed near that location years earlier, and I remembered the muddy trench and the contractor who complained about having to work around a sprinkler line. But that older repair was on Dad's map. The newly disturbed soil crossed the service main in a place where no branch was supposed to exist. I checked the distance twice, once from the nearest hydrant and once from the clubhouse corner, then photographed the trench from both directions.