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Within our dance community, several of us were getting calls for help and began to coordinate with each other, joining forces or splitting up, sharing parts and making store runs. People started to refer friends of friends, or anyone they heard about who had been without water. We were game to help but it was too much to keep track of so I set up a form online which fed into a spreadsheet that listed requests. The form was passed around the local mutual aid community. At first, there was no planned meeting, no explicit understanding of any kind that we were a group that did a certain type of thing and would do that thing again tomorrow. After a couple days, though, this became our new life. We would wake up, get on a conference call, look at the spreadsheet, and decide what to do that day. While it was happening, we didn't know when it would end, but it lasted about a week.

It was me, David, Michael, Colby, and Coleman. We all knew each other from ecstatic dance. If you don't know what that is, I'm not going to get into it here. Suffice to say, we had known each other for years but had never talked much.

Colby was a real licenced Irrigator, and had a healthy fear of the Plumber’s Union, which maintained a running threat that, if he or his kind were to ever plumb anything like a structure that humans lived in, he would be sued and have his license taken away forever. Colby had wizard-level pvc skills and got a lot of people up and running while looking over his shoulder.

It helped that we were doing this free of charge. To me, at least, it seemed like that would be an important part of a legal defense, so I was a little anxious about David’s karma-money-community gestalt. 

It felt kind of like vaccinating people; they were no longer in danger of becoming homeless and were not a strain on the city’s stretched emergency services. It felt strange to be collaborating with anarchists to support civilization, but then again, I could see how the sort of citizen empowerment I was engaged in could be at the heart of the anarchist ethos. It was exhilarating to drive around like a grimy vigilante, diving into people’s lives to try and fix something, it was the most social interaction I had had in a year. We were getting to know each other in a new context. All around us, the aroma of The State, which had been ever present in our lives, was gone. Maybe it had never been there in the way that we had thought. In my heart though, I still pined for a state that was in control and I fumed at the betrayals at the state and local levels of government. 

A community needs a variety of personalities to be resilient: aggressive, boundary crossing doers, rule following congregation members, and everything in between. In a chaotic environment, they all serve a purpose. But when one leader or state entity needs complete control, it's really just the rule followers who have a place. Those who can, switch back to being obedient citizens and perhaps cultivate fringe cultures. We build prisons for the others. I feel like I can flip back and forth between these modes, I'm lucky that way. I like chaos, but I would prefer the state had more control than it does. I would like it to be able to maintain the utility grid and to know when someone is dying of thirst. I would also like universal, single payer health care. We don’t want to talk about it, but when the next, much bigger pandemic hits, someone is going to need to close down the highways and herd us into pens. And when it's time to send colonists to the next planet, that’s going to be at scale too. Once we get there, we will need all the brave weirdos we can find again. They’re all in all our genes, waiting. 

As we ran out of supplies, Michael put up a gofundme campaign and very quickly we were raising money for parts and expenses. The city was still shut down and there was nothing else to do, so we committed to doing this for as long as it seemed necessary. We named ourselves The South Austin Guerilla Plumber Corps, but most people simply called us “The Gorilla Plumbers”, which was fine. 

This essay series is part of a project to document Texan’s experiences during the 2021 freeze. Do you have a story to share about the 2021 Texas freeze? Share it with my publication, Freeze Stories, on Medium. If its not filled with filth, I’ll publish it. Ok, I’ll publish it even if its filled with filth.