She streaks naked through the house, this 2-year-old spitfire, shrieking at full volume.
“No!” shouts Sarah De La Cerda. “It’s hot in there!”
“It’s not hot,” says her mother, Ronda, trying to coax her daughter into a bath that must be tempered just right without the luxury of hot and cold taps. “Daddy is making it cold for you.”
Her husband, Peter, is crouched over the tub pouring in water.
It’s the third night of the water crisis in Alamosa, and wash-up time at the De La Cerda household — where a family of six has learned to live on 6 gallons of water a day, including baths for an infant and three kids who love to wrestle, play football, and sweat till their clothes are wet — is turning into a test of wills, a battle of the bath.
And so it goes, and goes, in this small San Luis Valley community where just about everyone knows one another and all are now drawn together by shared hardship. House by house, families cope without the resource that has always been as easy as the flick of a wrist: water.
On Tuesday, nearly three weeks after salmonella was discovered, neighbors spotted red fliers everywhere warning them against using water for anything beyond flushing toilets because the system was being treated with high levels of chlorine.
This has altered the minutiae of daily life in ways that parents like Ronda and Peter De La Cerda could not have predicted, and in ways their children don’t always understand.
Ronda, 36, is a full-time mom now running a household where she can’t use the washing machine or the dishwasher. She must think of the tiniest details, like putting plastic bags over the faucets that the kids can reach so they don’t turn on the forbidden taps.
A bath “like mud water”
The first no-water night, they lined up their kids, youngest to oldest, and bathed them in a tub, one after the other.
“It was like mud water at the end,” says Ronda.
The second night, they drove 6 miles to the house of friends with a well and borrowed their shower.
This night, they’re trying to conserve water by using the baby’s tiny white plastic bathtub for all the children, even the oldest.
When Ronda finally gets her screaming daughter into the water, the 2-year-old is startled.
“Mom, it’s like a swimming pool!” she says.
“Yes. I don’t know why you were having such a fit,” says Ronda, gently lathering up the cucumber-and-melon shampoo in Sarah’s hair and rinsing it out before dressing her in pink pajamas and heading down the hall and into the kitchen. The room is filled with the aroma of cheese and white sauce from the vegetarian lasagna heating in the oven.
This is a family who, as Ronda puts it, “is pasta-ed out.”
They have been living on frozen Stouffers dinners since their house got red-tagged: chicken alfredo, lasagna, cheese ravioli. Because they use the giant family-size packages, they eat the leftovers for lunch.
Food boredom translates into fringe benefits at day’s end, however, when the total amount of things that need to be washed is three spoons, two knives, four sippy cups — little Sarah refuses to use disposable plastic cups — and two cookie sheets: one to heat the casserole and one for frozen oatmeal-raisin cookies.
Fresh-cooked food a splurge
Sometimes they splurge. Peter, a social studies teacher at Ortega Middle School, is a devoted dad who loves to cook for his kids. The schools are closed for the week and he’s home with the family, so the other day he got the urge to make breakfast for them.
“He had every pan out,” says Ronda. “Not just bacon and eggs, but bacon, eggs and sausage. I said, ‘OK, but you’re doing the dishes.’ ”
That part, he admits, “was a little burdensome.”
First he wiped out all the pans with paper towels. Then he boiled pans of water on the stove, dumped it all in the sink, and squirted in soap. Rinsing each pan took real effort, pumping water from the 5-gallon neon-orange Gatorade jug that is perched over the sink, rigged up for things like washing hands and dishes.
Mostly, like everyone else in town, they use paper plates and utensils.
“The first day Wal-Mart was sold out of spoons and forks,” says Ronda. “Luckily we had some left from birthday parties, so we used them.”
Already, the family has spent $89 on disposable dishware and frozen foods.
Now many in the community are starting to worry about the amount of stuff that is going to end up in the landfill — more damage to the local environment. Peter and Ronda would like to see more recycling bins conveniently located on neighborhood streets. As things stand now, Peter has to drive to the other end of town to recycle.
“I think everyone wants to do their part,” he says, “but someone like me doesn’t want to be inconvenienced for the whole nine yards.”
Ronda, eating her lasagna, thinks like a woman under siege. It’s just another job that needs to be done.
“Yeah,” she says, “hop in your car and load it up.”
More immediate tasks command their time. Peter has already called Sears to order a new filter for the ice maker on the refrigerator door. Someone told him the old one is now contaminated.
And, with garden season around the corner, another problem looms.
“I’m already looking ahead to the outside spigots, the lawn and sprinkler system,” he says, “wondering if we need to blow that out.”
Lawsuits and toothbrushing
After dinner, Andy Lavier stops by the house to drop off his son — a playmate of the De La Cerda boys, Isaiah, 9, and Elijah, 7 — who will spend the night.
For these kids, a week without water means a week without learning, another vacation so soon after spring break. The boys disappear, jetting off to the room with the PlayStation, while the adults stand in the kitchen, discussing the latest water-crisis news.
Three of Lavier’s four young kids were sick with salmonella, so he is hypervigilant, attending all the city meetings and monitoring developments.
“I just listened to the news and heard about the family that is suing the city,” he says to Peter.
“I noticed it’s a Seattle lawyer. When I lived out there, there was a Seattle law firm involved in the case against (Taco Bell) over an E. coli outbreak. I wonder if it’s the same guy.”
Seattle lawyer William Marler, who specializes in food poisoning cases including that particular E. coli situation, is indeed the same lawyer hired by Alamosa parents Raymond and Jennifer Cook.
Lavier, however, has no time to indulge his curiosity further. His pregnant wife waits outside in the car, and he’s extra careful with her health in this time of uncertainty. He dashes out the door with a quick wave, leaving Ronda and Peter to wind down the evening, rinse off the dishes and start the long process of brushing teeth, one kid at a time.
“You don’t realize how much you take for granted until you can’t do it,” says Peter. “Like showers or brushing teeth.”
Formerly, he brushed four times a day. For now, he’s whittled it down to once.
“You have to pour bottled water over the toothbrush, then rinse your mouth with bottled water, then rinse off your toothbrush with bottled water,” he says. “Before you’d just turn on the faucet and go for it.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com
