The Borehole We Were So Proud Of Was Quietly Making Us Ill

We bought the smallholding four years ago with a head full of romance and very little practical knowledge. Two hectares, a tired old farmhouse, a stand of gum trees, and, most exciting of all, our very own borehole. City people that we were, the borehole felt like the height of self sufficiency. Our own water, out of our own ground, needing nobody's permission and nobody's monthly bill.

I used to stand at the kitchen tap in those first months and feel something close to smugness. This water came from beneath my own feet. What could be more pure than that.

The bug that would not go

It started slowly, which is why it took us so long to see it. My husband Pieter got a stomach thing that we blamed on a takeaway. It cleared up, then came back. Then I got it. Our son, who was six, seemed to catch every little thing going and we put it down to him being six. For most of a year we were, as a household, never quite well. Never sick enough to stop, always a little off. Tired. Unsettled stomachs. A general greyness that we explained away a hundred different ways.

We blamed the school. We blamed stress. We blamed the season. Pieter blamed my cooking once, which he now denies. It genuinely did not occur to either of us to blame the thing we were most proud of.

The turning point was our GP, a sharp woman who had seen a lot. After the third visit in a few months she leaned back and asked a question that stopped me cold. She asked where our water came from. I said, proudly, our own borehole. She did not look impressed. She looked concerned. She asked when we had last had it tested, and I did not have an answer, because the honest answer was never.

The assumption I did not know I was making

Driving home I felt foolish in a way that is hard to describe. I had assumed that water from the ground was clean because it came from the ground. But of course the ground is not empty. There was a small livestock operation up the slope from us. There had been an old, half collapsed structure near our boundary that I had never thought about. Water moves. It carries things. What comes up your borehole is a record of everything it has passed through on the way, and I had been treating it like bottled spring water because it made me feel clever.

Pieter, who is an engineer and therefore incapable of leaving a problem alone once he sees it, went straight into research mode that evening. He came out of the study and said we needed proper water testing, not a strip you dip in a glass, but the real thing, a laboratory looking at what was actually living and dissolved in what we had been drinking and cooking with and bathing our child in for four years.

I remember feeling sick in a new way then. Not the vague greyness. A sharp, specific fear about my son.

Sending the jars away

There is something oddly emotional about filling a sterile bottle with water from your own tap and sending it away to be judged. I followed the instructions exactly, the right container, the right way to let the tap run first, the careful labelling. Pieter drove the samples in himself because he did not trust the post with something that felt this important.

The people doing the analysis were patient with my endless questions. I had not understood, before this, how much science sits behind a glass of water. They explained what they would look for, the bacterial counts, the chemical readings, the things that have no taste or smell and give you no warning at all. I had always imagined bad water would announce itself, would be cloudy or foul. They gently corrected me. The dangerous stuff, they said, is usually invisible.

While we waited I could not stop thinking about all the glasses I had handed my son. All the pots of pasta. All the times I had filled his water bottle for school feeling like a good mother.

The results

The results came back and they were not catastrophic, but they were not clean either. There was bacterial contamination well above what is considered safe, the kind that comes from exactly the sort of thing that was uphill of us. There were a couple of other readings out of range too. Nothing that would drop you where you stood, but plenty to explain a year of a family that was never quite well.

Reading that report was a strange mix of horror and relief. Horror because we had been drinking it. Relief because finally, finally, there was a reason, and a reason can be fixed. A mystery illness is a haunting. A contaminated borehole is a problem with a solution.

We learned that proper water laboratories do not just hand you a page of numbers and leave you to panic. The people we dealt with walked us through what each reading meant, what was urgent and what was minor, and what kind of treatment would actually address our specific results rather than some generic fix.

Clean at last

We put in a proper treatment and filtration system, sized to what the analysis had actually found rather than what a salesman wanted to sell us. And then, because Pieter is Pieter, we tested again afterwards to prove it had worked. That second clean report is stuck to the fridge to this day, next to our son's drawings. It is the only lab result I have ever felt proud of.

The change in the house was not instant, but within a couple of months the greyness lifted. The stomach things stopped. Our son had a whole term without catching everything going around. Pieter and I looked at each other one evening and realised we both simply felt well, all the time, in a way we had forgotten was normal.

I test the water on a schedule now. Twice a year, without fail, because I have learned that the reassuring taste of your own borehole tells you absolutely nothing about its safety. Anyone I meet who is proud of their own water, the way I once was, I ask them the same question our GP asked me. When did you last have it tested. Most of them, like me, have never done it at all, and I try to say it kindly, because I remember the smugness.

I still love that our water comes from beneath our own feet. I have simply learned that the ground keeps no secrets from a good set of water labs, and that pride is no substitute for actually knowing what you are drinking. The romance is still there. It just has a filter on it now, and a report on the fridge.