The farm account did not share my optimism. The water system had electricity, treatment supplies, laboratory bills, insurance, and parts whose prices rose every time I opened a catalog. We postponed repainting the tank another season. I repaired a pump controller instead of replacing it, then lay awake wondering whether the repair would last through August. When the county sent the annual permit invoice, Anna stared at it across the kitchen table and asked a question I did not have an answer for: "How much longer can we keep paying to serve people who have already paid somebody else?"
It was a fair question. I did not know then that those residents had been charged a separate water infrastructure assessment for years, or that the amount collected would eventually be measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. I only knew what arrived in our account, which was nothing. And I knew Diane had stopped using the word customer whenever she spoke about the relationship between Cedar Hollow and the Wilson water system. The real reason for the new vocabulary appeared the following spring.
A development company had begun grading land beyond the north ridge, a tract that had once been pasture and scrub oak. Their brochures showed neat streets and identical houses arranged around a second artificial pond. Phase Two, the signs promised. Two hundred and forty homes, walking trails, an expanded clubhouse, and a life of quiet convenience for families who wanted to escape the city without surrendering its comforts.
On paper, the project was ambitious. To a water operator, it was a collection of questions nobody had answered. Where would those families get drinking water? Who had measured the well's sustainable yield in a dry year? What pressure would remain at the far end of the old distribution main if another two hundred and forty houses turned on their showers at seven in the morning? Where was the storage capacity, the treatment redundancy, the emergency supply plan?
I attended a county planning session because a notice in the newspaper described a proposed utility connection that did not appear on any application submitted to me. The developer's representative stood in front of a projector screen and spoke about "existing neighborhood infrastructure" with the easy confidence of a man who had never had to replace a failed check valve in freezing rain. When someone asked whether the new houses would have a separate well, he pointed vaguely toward Cedar Hollow on the map. I raised my hand and asked for the permitted source-capacity analysis. The representative said that detail would be resolved during construction.
After the meeting, Diane stopped me outside the auditorium. She asked whether I enjoyed embarrassing potential investors. I told her I had asked a technical question about a technical system. "You are thinking too small," she said, smiling at a man who passed us before turning back to me.