There was no way of knowing whether the failed union had been spraying water for one hour or for ten. The floor drain was barely keeping up with the flow.
  Our home heating system, water heated by either a wood fire or by electricity, had operated for seven years without mishap, if we don’t count the time it overheated and blew steam through the pressure relief valve in the middle of the night with the sounds and effects of a modest Yellowstone geyser.
  That was in the first year, and it happened when I was home. It hasn’t happened since then because I immediately ordered a passive overheat relief circuit that the boilermaker recommended and that I thought we could do without.
  It may have been that boilover that weakened the insulating bushing in a union between copper pipe and iron boiler, but it took six years for it to fail at a time when I was on the other side of the country and Barb was on the other side of Puget Sound.
  The light on the phone in my hotel room blinked without indicating the urgency of the message.
  I tried to visualize the valves, switches, and circuit breakers and describe them over the phone well enough that Barb could turn off water supply, heating elements, and the circulating pump.
  I flew and drove home the next morning and went to a plumbing store for a new insulating union.
  Even after moving a pile of waterlogged firewood, seeing what I was doing and finding elbowroom to do it was difficult. I went back to the plumbing store, thinking I needed more fittings when what I needed was more hands.
  The plumber, a friend with an idle hour on his hands, came over in his service truck to help.
  Nearly three hours later, the failed union was out and the new one was in. We also replaced a weak pipe joint that cracked while we were installing the union.
  One of the cheap isolation valves this same plumber had warned the heating people not to use when the house was abuilding broke in my hand. We replaced it with the one that should have been used in the first place.
  The job far exceeded the few minutes of expected neighborly help, of course, so I wrote out a check and considered I’d gotten a bargain.
  There was one more little problem: The water thermostat had quit, perhaps from having been subjected to hours of spray the day before, so the heating system would not work.
  A wholesaler right here in the Dungeness Valley located the very model we needed and ordered it.
  Meanwhile, we had the wood stove in the living room for heat. The problem was, all the firewood was cut long to fit the boiler. I cut two inches off the ends of enough boiler fuel to fill the woodbox and drove to Seattle to catch a flight back to work.
  That morning, the only significant snowfall in years had made flying out of SeaTac on schedule…
  Never mind. That’s another story.