The well diggers arrived on a windy late-January morning, too unseasonably warm to ask them, as I joked with my father that I would, about the relative coldness of their asses. Besides, it isn’t done that way anymore—no shovels or crouching down or even actual digging. Their three large trucks barely made it up our steep gravel driveway. One truck carried water to cool the drill and flush the well of debris; one hauled the twenty-foot drill bits that would bore into the earth; and one held the rig, which supported and powered the drilling. Before they could even position the rig above our well, which we had hired them to dig deeper, they had to cut down a poplar tree and a sweet-gum tree and some hollies. The trees were felled, sectioned, and rolled over the hill in minutes, while I watched, wincing, from the kitchen window. It’s okay, I told myself. We have plenty of trees but not enough water.
I’d known this day was coming ever since Richard and I bought our house more than six years ago and noticed the black coil of tubing that once carried water from our neighbor’s house to ours, back when they were both rental properties. “You know how renters are,” Bill Spiegel said when we asked about the tubing. Back in 1975, the year before Richard and I were born, Bill built the cabin entirely of handmade and salvaged materials, designing its footprint and post-and-beam construction around the existing trees and steep grade of the land. When he couldn’t salvage windows large enough to accommodate the passive solar design and views he wanted, he had glass cut and framed it himself. The cedar posts supporting the roof and rafters were collected from the property; they rest on rocks Bill dug up and buried. Everything about the house is seventies-era DIY. “Bill did all this,” our plumber said dismissively, “when he was vibing on life.”
On the day we first saw the house, Bill pointed out the layout’s good feng shui; the large, south-facing windows; the old claw-foot tub and beauty-shop sink he’d restored. By the time we walked all five acres and visited the property’s shared easement to the Haw River, we decided not to worry too much about the ominous tubing or the mysterious presence of two wells instead of one. After moving in, we quickly found that Bill was right—there was something ineffable that made the house feel bigger than its eight hundred square feet. We loved that we didn’t have to hang curtains in any of the windows, that we could sleep with the French doors to the screen porch wide open in the spring and summertime, listening to the night song of crickets and cicadas and owls.
We figured we would make do with whatever water our two low-producing wells provided, and we put off calling well drillers as long as we could. We grew accustomed to the inconvenience: strategically choosing the best time to do laundry, jumping out of a weak shower and streaking across the driveway to switch tanks, washing dishes with just a trickle of water. In a way, the meagerness of our wells had a positive effect, reminding us to conserve, to be mindful of at least that one limited resource, which we monitored via a gauge in our garage. I was highly attuned to the condition of both wells, even though I couldn’t see what was inside them, and also constantly afraid of running out of water. But when is it ever a good time to spend thousands of dollars on something with uncertain results? Though Richard and I both have degrees in fine arts, we thought the answer was never.
“There’s no guarantee,” Mr. Maness told me cheerfully, once the rig was already drilling. W. W. Maness and Sons hold Chatham County’s drilling permit number 58, a sign of how long they’ve been doing business here. It’s true, there is no guarantee, no way to know whether drilling any well a few hundred feet deeper will yield more water or what they call a dry hole. In the hilly and rocky land around our property, unlucky farmers and landowners have been known to drill one after another. Even the most skeptical will enlist dousers, who “witch” the land with a forked stick to determine the best spot for drilling. Why not? they figure. Dousers work for a nominal fee—some old-timers won’t accept payment at all—and everyone has a neighbor or friend with a high-producing well somebody witched.
We were down two hundred feet already, and there was no more water—“not a drop,” Mr. Maness said. At ten dollars a foot, and an eight-hundred-dollar setup fee to position their truck over our existing well, we were already in it for close to three grand. Work slowed while the men hoisted a new drill bit onto the rig, then lowered it into the hole. I stood and watched the heavy rod slowly disappear, while behind the rig, waste water and rock fragments spewed into the trees. I tried not to think about the money.
“We checked their well tag, and they got twenty gallons a minute at six forty,” Mr. Maness told me, pointing up the hill at my other neighbors’ well. I knew that and was prepared to go that deep, though I also knew that my neighbors didn’t hit anything before they got to 640.
“You think the water’s just that far down?” I asked, picturing an aquifer, blue and level, as in a textbook.
Mr. Maness shrugged. It’s more like veins, he told me, tracing a twisted pattern in the air with his hand. But he hoped we’d hit water before too long.
I wished I could ask my neighbors about the waiting, if they felt like giving up at 500 feet, or at 550 or 600, but two years ago they had twins, and they moved to town.
Back inside the house I returned to my other preoccupation, also fraught with worries about money and uncertainty. I’d spent the past two days calling pharmacies to find the best price on medication to suppress, then stimulate, my ovaries for my first cycle of in vitro fertilization.
It took us so long to make this decision—more than two years since we first met our reproductive endocrinologist—that Dr. Young’s office had moved from a nearby university hospital to a new office complex in the Raleigh suburbs. But I still had notes from meetings with him scattered throughout a pocket-sized notebook, and I could distinctly remember our first appointment, when he said, “I’m ninety percent sure I can get you pregnant with IVF.” IVF seemed a long way away then—there were other, less expensive treatments to try first—and I did not write his prediction down, so I had only my memory that he said it, and the way Richard and I both bristled at the idea that a doctor would get me pregnant.
The presence of medicine in something so deeply personal, so long hoped for, so much a part of how we envision ourselves, is perhaps the rudest awakening within the experience of assisted reproduction. No one imagines that she will need to be tested, medicated, and injected before conceiving a child, that her eggs will have to be retrieved and combined in a laboratory with her partner’s sperm before being transferred back to her body. Like water, our bodies and their generative capacity are something most of us take for granted.
So we tried the other, less invasive methods first: tried oral medication, tried intrauterine insemination and acupuncture and natural-cycle timing and taking a break from actively trying. In July 2012, after all those methods failed, we visited our doctor again, and I took notes about a possible IVF cycle. Among my pencil scribbles were terse phrases expressing my incomplete understanding of what it would be like: “Moderate level of meds” and “Morning ultrasound, five times” and “six-week process” and “two weeks really busy.” I drew a line under those notes, then wrote “appx. $13,000 including meds, one try.”
As with our upper well, which had been failing since the summer, I knew that our time was running out. At thirty-six, I was already past the age at which fertility precipitously declines. I had accommodated my life to childlessness in as many ways as I accommodated a scarcity of water. But still it felt as though we were missing something essential. Because having a child was something I’d always taken for granted, it was difficult to imagine or understand my life without that experience. Why had I bothered to store away all this information about raising children? Why had I saved all of these picture books, and bought this house in the country, and married this man? Why had I imagined myself as a mother, and Richard as a father?
So we did it—we scheduled and took our blood tests right before our trip to Iceland, and we paid the money a few days after we returned, more than I’d ever paid at one time for anything in my life. We watched YouTube videos on how to inject Lupron into the upper thigh, how to mix the Follistim and Menopur into a single dose before injecting it into a pinch of stomach fat.
Obtaining the Lupron, the Follistim, and the Menopur was another matter. The specialty mail-order pharmacy that miraculously accepted my insurance was slow and uncertain. They could not tell me when it would ship, only that I had to be patient. No one I spoke to knew how to pronounce the medicine I was ordering, or what it was for (maybe this is why it was covered by insurance), and they did not seem to understand that the schedule my nurse emailed me required me to begin my medicine on a certain (fast approaching) day.
I called the number for the second time that morning, hoping the customer service agents would be able to hear me over the low drone of drilling that shook our small house.
The prerecorded message reminded me that things could be worse. “If you are an oncology patient, please press two. For Avonex patients, please press three. For MS patients who are not taking Avonex, please press four. If you are a hepatitis patient, please press five.” I pressed seven, for “all other patients,” and tried to think about the ways that I was lucky.
But once on the phone with a representative, I found myself channeling the will of a patient ordering something life sustaining. “I need this medicine,” I told the woman who slowly read through my order, spelling out Leuprolide rather than trying to pronounce it. “I have to have it by Wednesday.”
“I’ll mark it Urgent,” she told me, without promising anything.
I told her I’d call back in a few hours.
I hung up and went outside with my camera, snapping photos of the trucks, the tall rig, the pale mud coating nearby trees: documentation of the expense, the effort. Then I stood near the rig, my hands cupped over my ears. Mr. Maness noticed me and walked over with an apologetic look. We were down to six hundred feet, without any more water to show for it. I tried to picture six hundred feet vertical and found that I could not.
They had used all the drill bits that they brought and would have to come back tomorrow with more. “Rock’s changing,” he told me, describing how it was now darker and softer. That I could picture: rock crumbling like clay, giving over to water. “That could be a good sign. But we won’t go more than a couple hundred more feet. After that, we’ll have to stop.”
Bill Spiegel still calls our house the hippie house when introducing us to neighbors; the label is actually listed on the plat. Back when he first built it, the structure was a single thirty-two-by-sixteen-foot room. He fed his woodstove with trees felled on the property, cooked meals on a two-burner hot plate powered by temporary service from the electric company—essentially an outlet wired to a post in the yard—and slept in a loft above the bathroom, which had the claw-foot tub and sink that first charmed us but no toilet and no door. He used an outhouse or peed in the yard for five years, until he dated a woman who got so fed up with his version of country living that she finally roped a bartered toilet to the back of his Volkswagen Bug while he was at work at Glaxo, a pharmaceutical company in Raleigh. “The company photographer took a picture of it,” he told me. He drove the toilet home and installed it, and the girlfriend stayed for a few more years.
He doesn’t live that way anymore—he has a three-thousand-square-foot house on ten acres across the road, another place he built on the river, and an apartment in a LEED-certified building in Chapel Hill. Still, the ethos of the back-to-the-land movement that drew Bill and others like him to Chatham County in the 1970s is evident all around us, not so much in the now-older (and considerably wealthier) hippies who are our neighbors but in the deed to our house and land, which carry with them a restrictive covenant designed to resist the suburban values Bill and his fellow homesteaders were fleeing. Just a few miles down the road, new developments with names like Chapel Ridge and Laurel Estates promise a different kind of life, their hulking brick-faced houses (“From the $370s,” read the signs) fed by massive water towers and barely shaded by tall, widely spaced pines. No one in our community can build closer than seventy-five feet to the property line; we can’t put up halogen or sodium vapor lighting or build a McMansion. We can’t cut down more than 50 percent of the trees on our lots or divide them into smaller parcels (all lots are five or more acres). And we can’t have a whole passel of kids unless we want to buy more land—written into the covenant is the restriction that you must have one acre of land for each member of the household.
I like to picture each lot subdivided by imaginary lines, our neighbors standing out in the woods on their acre-or-more portions, arms spread wide as in a giant game of hippie four square. Richard says there’s no way this rule is legally enforceable, but recently a real estate deal fell through when a family of six wanted to buy a five-acre lot. The sellers’ agent drove all around with a proposal exempting the family from the covenant; we debated whether we’d sign (Richard was for the exemption; I was against), but it didn’t matter in the end. No one else would sign it, and the family bought somewhere else.
The early to mid-1970s, just before Bill and his fellow homesteaders drafted their “one person per acre” covenant, is the one period in American history when having children—as many as you could afford to look after—slipped from favor. Cultural resistance to pronatalist ideology took many forms. Feminists decried the suffocation of marriage and motherhood, and proponents of child-free living began asserting the perks of life without kids: more time for romance, for travel and art and self-actualization. More money, better sex. “Take your pick,” wrote Ellen Peck in her quaintly sexist 1971 book, The Baby Trap, which proposed child-free living as the best way to stay attractive and keep your man. “Housework and children—or the glamour, involvement and excitement of a free life.” But perhaps most compelling, to men and women who wanted to preserve every possible tree and shield the night sky from the glare of useless lampposts, was the argument Paul Ehrlich made in The Population Bomb: there were too many of us already.
By the early 1970s, Ehrlich’s bestselling book had grown into a full-blown movement: ZPG, or Zero Population Growth, an organization with chapters in thirty states. Ehrlich saw population growth as a “cancer” that could no longer be treated but had to be excised before mankind bred itself to extinction. “The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children,” he was fond of telling the audiences greeting him at college campuses around the country. If that sounded unappealing, he had an easy-to-remember fallback plan: “Stop at Two.”
It appeared to be working: by 1975, the year Bill built our house and envisioned a covenant restricting its occupants, the American fertility rate had fallen from 3.4 children per woman to 1.8 children, producing an overall population decline of one percent per year. One point eight children: you can picture them in a yurt or a tiny “hippie house” like ours. Or no children—in the copies of Shelter and Woodstock Handmade Houses Richard has collected from thrift stores around town, the yurts, cabins, and shacks are empty, too neat to be the homes of children. Flipping through the brownish photographs, I see looms and easels and woodworking stations but no cribs or toys.
Stopping at two implies replacement, equilibrium. Zero population growth: there is something elegant about that math. In my support group, most people said they’d be satisfied—delighted, even—with one, or with a child they could be sure of adopting as an infant. But no one wanted to make up for the hyper-fertile: even Ehrlich fathered a child before his vasectomy.
That night I presented the options to Richard as Mr. Maness explained them to me: stop drilling and limp along, keep drilling and hope to hit more water, drill a new well somewhere else, or restore the well we had. I’d already calculated the price of each option and its relative damage to our savings. Well restoration, which involved forcing hundreds of gallons of pressurized water into low-producing wells, would easily cost $5,000, but so would drilling a new well. Nothing could guarantee more water.
I grew up in a hundred-year-old log cabin and was familiar with the many ways a house and its property can turn on you: fallen trees, frozen pipes, wells swamped with greenish storm water. Richard grew up in the suburbs of D.C., and I worried, when we bought this house, that he might be put off by its inconveniences. As a couple, we had lived only in cities, and we’d moved almost every year to a new apartment, a new neighborhood. We appreciated the convenience of calling the landlord when something broke or needed to be serviced, and the proximity of restaurants, music, shops. The house we bought—this house—is ten miles from the nearest gas station. Our covenant restricting outdoor lights makes nights pitch-black except for the stars, and back when we moved in, I wondered, what if Richard freaks out, like my New York–born grandmother, who drew all the never-used, army-green shades in our cabin and taped them down with masking tape?
But the house, the life we live here, has changed him. He appreciates the privacy and the chance to learn skills—plumbing, chainsawing, driveway maintenance—that were previously unnecessary. He’s stocked our bookshelves with books on home repair and using salvaged materials (Electrical Basics, How to Build Furniture without Tools), and with those hand-built-housing manuals from the 1970s. Lately he’d become interested in emergency preparedness, a response I suspected was as related to the isolation of our personal circumstances as it was to the increased frequency of powerful storms and long droughts.
“I don’t know what we’ll do if they don’t hit water,” I told him, scrolling through a table of well-restoration data I found online. This was my real fear, both for the well and for IVF—that our efforts would not work, and, resources depleted, we would have to figure out something else.
Richard was calm, his mind bent not to subtraction but to addition. “It’ll be okay,” he told me. He could figure out how to earn the extra money we needed, he said. I was struck by how much, in his calm material determination, he reminded me of my own father, and also by how readily we were falling into traditional gender roles, as if by conforming we might have a better chance of getting what we wanted. He gathered the resources; I managed them while agitating for more. An old story.
I often make Richard promise me things he has no ability to predict, but I knew better than to do that now. Instead I told him about the pharmacy phone calls and my suspicion that no one I knew could understand the vocabulary of both dilemmas—gallons per minute in a deep rock well, follicle suppression and stimulation through injectable medications (though perhaps our neighbors knew something of both, it occurred to me later). In some ways our goals felt ridiculously modest—one baby, a slightly bigger house, enough water to wash clothes and shower without worrying—and that was alienating too. “A gallon a minute,” I said. “I’d settle for that.” I was sure we could function on a gallon a minute.
I sometimes had nightmares involving broken eggs with yolks and shells, but lately those had been replaced by pleasant dreams about babies. I dreamed of the heft of their little torsos, the sweet smell of their heads, their laughing faces. None of them looked especially like me or Richard, and I wasn’t even aware, in my dreams, that they were ours.
But that was what I was thinking about the next morning when I woke up: babies. Then I remembered the well-drilling rig still parked expensively up my hill, and the uncertainty.
Richard stayed home in case we didn’t hit water, so we could decide together whether to give up or tell them to drill in a different spot. The men started early. By now I could tell by sound alone when they were drilling and when the truck was idling. I sat on the sofa and tried to work while Richard stood at the window and watched. “Something’s changing,” he said after a while. “There’s more water.”
I got up and looked at the place where the rig blew waste and exhaust into the woods. “It always looks like that,” I said. “It looked like that yesterday.”
But a few minutes later, Richard reported that the men were mucking around with shovels and a scoop cut from a plastic gallon jug. They were fitting a new length of PVC onto the exhaust pipe and digging a trench in the grayish sludge that had once been solid rock. We were still guessing at what it could mean when Mr. Maness came to the door.
“You’ll be okay now,” he said. “You’ve got five gallons a minute.”
We high-fived; we did a dance of happiness. Five gallons a minute would be enough for us, and even enough for a family. I stepped onto the damp porch in my socks and watched Mr. Maness make his way back to the rig, where he had still more to do: additional drilling to get beneath the vein, then extracting the thirty-four sections of drill bits that had finally, far below, found water. It could have easily gone the other way. We have some neighbors with deep, dry wells and others who could supply an entire farm with water. We wound up in the middle, but we never intended to start a farm.
“That’ll be plenty,” Mr. Maness reassured us again, before he and his crew left in their three trucks. “Plenty for the whole house.”