I live in an old adobe upgraded in the early ‘60s by drunken beatniks. Pre-hippie Anglo Taoseños, basically. By “upgraded” I mean added cinder block bathroom and kitchen plus electrical outlets and running water. A few years later the owner and my future landlord added a tiny studio apartment on the end of the building for himself and rented out the main house. It’s only about 800 sq. ft, so “main house” sounds a little grandiose. Anyway, none of this work was done by professionals of any kind, yet somehow it all has more or less survived into the present. I’ve been here over 20 years. The landlord died back in the early 20-teens, and the property has been in probate limbo ever since for reasons that are so pure Taos, no one who doesn’t live here would ever understand.

At any rate, my bedroom shares a wall with the studio apartment that’s been abandoned ever since the landlord died. On the other side of that wall, gophers filled his little bathroom up with dirt, the window frames have rotted out, and you can see through big cracks in the door. The “main house” I rent (payments to his niece) is funky “old Taos” but livable if primitive. So.

I recently noticed brown stains in the plaster on the wall behind the bed. Last night I finally realized there are “bubbles” I can push in with my finger and the wall feels damp. OH LORD. Directly on the apartment side of that adobe wall is what once passed for a kitchen. Tiny sink and counter, stove, etc.

My current landlady is very nice and hasn’t been here in about a dozen years. She lives in AZ and PA. I don’t bother her with maintenance concerns and take care of things as best I can unless it’s serious, which this might be, I realized. So today I donned a mask and plastic gloves and entered the studio apartment to take a look underneath the kitchen counter…

It was very wet.

Water was dripping from several places all at once and could have been doing so for months or even years. Before I called for help, I knew I’d have to find just where the trouble was, but all I could see was an insane ancient mess of amateur plumbing. Naturally there wasn’t an obvious cut-off valve. What I really needed was a way to shut down all the water to the apartment, duh. Yes, it’s been pressurized all these years, and no, there wasn’t one that I could see.

But then, AHA! Way back underneath the counter where no human hand could reach, I saw the rusty round handle of a valve. The pipes had been installed first and the counter built around them! They’d even cut a chunk out of a two-by-four to accommodate the valve. Outrageous. I traced the pipes to figure out the water flow and thought that might be what would cut off pressure to the leaks, but there was only one way to find out.

Long story short, I ripped up the wet rotting boards beside the sink and closed the valve. You never know when such a thing will simply snap if you try to force it—dear God please no—but it didn’t and the DRIPPING STOPPED!

There may be a shut-off valve to the studio apartment in my bathroom wall (boards and cinder blocks) and I will check. For now there isn’t any water dripping down, and in a year or so the bedroom wall might actually dry out enough to plaster again.

Once again your boy got lucky. In gratitude I found a couple contractor size garbage bags and filled them both to tidy up the place a little. Too heavy though, so I’ll have to come back later with my wheelbarrow. I also saw the dead landlord’s hats and jackets still hanging on hooks where his relatives had left them and put them in a third black garbage bag, which I did place gently in my trash can with a little benediction, so Dale (a former drama critic for the Dallas Morning News) would finally have some peace. That felt almost as good as closing the valve, and there you have it. - JHF