IF YOUR Block COULD Talk

Fascinating facts about the streets where we live

- Spike Carlsen

ONE BITTERLY COLD morning a few years back, I shuffled into the bathroom and turned on the water to brush my teeth. Nada. In a fog, I trudged to the kitchen faucet hoping for better. Nope. My next shuffle was to my phone to call my city water department. The voice that answered was that of someone who’d already answered the phone one too many times that morning. I learned that my waterline was frozen. Only one company could remedy the problem, and it was booked for two days.

Two days later, after I got the all-clear, the guy at the water department told me, “Unless you wanna go through that again, open a faucet and let a pencil lead stream of water run for the rest of the winter.” For the next six weeks, we did just that.

The endless trickle became a gnawing reminder of everything I didn’t know. I really had no idea where our water came from. Or where it went. Or, for that matter, how my phone call to the water department had gotten through to the water department. As I stared out the window, I further realized I knew nothing about the concrete sidewalk leading to our door, the lawn beneath the freshly fallen snow, the squirrels in the trees, the ancient walnut tree on the boulevard ... nothing.

And these were just the things I could see through one dinky window. I’d read books about journeying across Antarctica, down the Amazon River, and up Mount Everest; I’d written books about 50,000-year-old wood buried in the bogs of New Zealand and the violin makers of Cremona, Italy—but I knew nothing about the world right outside my front door. So I started doing some research, and I learned the most fascinating things ...