Lesbi Honest; He Had It Comin’

This happened in the late 1990s in rural South Carolina.

My relative is an out lesbian. Indeed, she and her partner were in discussion to be the plaintiffs in a legal case seeking to overturn bans on same-sex marriage.

[Partner] got a job as a high-powered engineer for a major international company and moved to South Carolina. Wanting to live in a more rural area, [Partner] and [Relative] found a home that was a converted barn sitting on about eight acres complete with a pool, a private lake, a small fruit orchard, and some open fields.

As there were some electrical drops in various parts of the property, the sellers let [Partner] know that there are actually three electric meters for the property, each billed separately. The main house was on one, there was a hookup on a light pole in the orchard, and there was one more for a well on the property. Go figure. The two meters that were not the main house were cheap, so [Partner] and [Relative] didn’t give it much thought.

After they had lived there for a few months, [Relative] mentioned to me that the electric bill for their well pump had gone way up — nothing outrageous, but from around $6 per month to nearly $40. Curious, I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations and found that the quarter-horsepower pump would have needed to run twenty-four-seven for about twenty-five straight days to use that much electricity. It was just the two of them living there, and there was no way they could have used that much water. Something wasn’t right.

I began a bit of investigation, looking for a leak. I followed the waterline out of the house and, oddly, it ran off away from the well out in the field. I followed the line back into the edge of the woods behind the barn and found, much to everyone’s surprise, another well with its own pump powered from the main house!

So, what the h*** was this other pump in the field for? I started digging. Surprisingly, that well ran to the neighbor’s house. And that is when we finally got the full story.

The neighbor was the pastor at the church where the former homeowners attended. They had an arrangement that the former homeowner let the pastor get his water from the well on the farm property, and the former homeowner just paid the bill.

But somehow, there had been an electrical fault to ground (if I recall correctly; I don’t really understand electrical stuff much), and the meter was spinning almost non-stop. That is why the bill spiked.

So, [Partner], not wanting to rock the boat, offered the pastor continued use of the well if he would fix the electrical issue and get the meter moved into his name.

But he refused! He insisted that he had a right to free well water — at [Partner]’s expense — and got rather unpleasant about it. “This is what God wants!” and similar proclamations were hurled [Partner]’s way.

Fine. Her well. Her pump. [Partner] gave him a couple of weeks’ notice and disconnected the electrical meter. No pump. No water. No longer her problem.

Rather than agreeing to reimburse [Partner] maybe $80 in excess bills over a couple of months, paying to get the pump fixed, and taking over the rather modest bill, we saw a well drilling rig at the pastor’s house a few days later. It must have been thousands of dollars!

To cap it off, [Relative] talked [Partner] into doing something else with that well. They did fix the pump, run a new water line, and build a bathroom with showers — all for their new women-only lesbian campground.

The campground didn’t last particularly long as a business; it mostly just covered some basic expenses for a few large events each summer. But if not for the pastor’s obstinance, it might never have existed at all.