The Hose Bib, and the Water in the Truck

The last stop on the walk is the one tap on the property that waters the lawn, the dog and the car, and never once the man holding the hose.

The stop

I finish every perimeter at the hose bib, because water is the thing every pest on the list needs and the outside tap is where a house most often gives it away for free. This one dripped about once a second. The soil below it was black and soft to a depth of my thumb, and the bucket someone had left under it to catch the drip had done its job too well: it was half full, green at the edges, and in the still water along the side I counted the small wriggling commas that become mosquitoes in a week.

A wet patch against a foundation is an open invitation. Earwigs, pill bugs and millipedes live in it. Ants build under the slab edge next to it because the soil stays workable. Termites, where they are present, find a damp foundation long before they find a dry one. And the bucket, or the saucer under the pot, or the clogged gutter, is where the mosquitoes that bite the family on the porch at stop five were born. A pest technician does not control mosquitoes with a sprayer first; he controls them with a bucket turned upside down.

The job here was a new washer in the tap and a new vacuum breaker on the spout, because the old one leaked back. The bucket was emptied, scrubbed and stored on its side. The hose was taken off the bib and coiled on a hanger so it would not hold water at the low end. I asked the owner to walk the yard once a week after rain and turn over anything that was holding water, and to keep the soil at the foundation dry enough to be dusty, which is the one place on a property where dust is the goal.

The note

The owner of this house drove a work truck and spent his days on job sites, and while I was changing the washer he mentioned that he got a headache most afternoons around four and had assumed for years it was the sun. I asked what he drank through the day. Coffee until noon, he said, then nothing much, then a beer when he got home. There was a water jug in the truck, he added, but it was usually the same water he had put in it on Monday.

This is where I stop being a technician and start being a man who has stood in a lot of yards in a lot of heat. I will not tell anyone what his body needs; a doctor does that. I will record that research has looked at how a working day goes with and without water within reach, and that the general shape of it is that people who drink through the day, before they feel the need, report the afternoon differently from the people who wait for thirst to tell them. Some men notice that the four o'clock headache arrives less often on the days the jug came out of the truck at ten.

The habit is the jug, filled fresh at the kitchen tap every morning, not the hose bib, and carried into every site rather than left in the cab. Drink from it at the start of each job, not the end. Keep a second one at the hose bib for the dog and the garden, so there is never a question of which is which. And at the end of the day, before the beer, drink one full glass at the kitchen sink standing up, the way the drip at the tap outside runs: steadily, and without anyone having to think about it.

The washer was mine. The jug was his, and it was already in the truck; it only needed filling. That is the whole lesson of this perimeter, six times over: the house already has most of what the man inside it needs. The job is to notice where it leaks.