A Tale of a Tub

Drip. Drip. Drip. Hidden beneath the dense underbrush of TWU’s Back Forty lies an unlikely bathroom fixture — an old bathtub with a five-foot-high tap that drips mildly every second or so. To the untrained eye it looks like someone’s junk, but the insiders’ tub tale is that it serves as a Band-Aid solution to a construction mistake from decades ago…or so the story goes.

Legend has it there was a grand idea to build married housing at TWU. A flat area of the Back Forty seemed like an appropriate building-site, so construction crews began digging into the ground. After excavating 18 inches or so, they realized that the water table in the area was too high and that building on the site would be too expensive. They abandoned the project but left one significant problem: a well that could now not be shut off. Rather than have the area flood, says the rumour, workers installed a bathtub into the ground with a spout, forcing the water to slowly drip from the tap into the bathtub, and then gently overflow into the surrounding area, avoiding any potential water erosion caused by flooding. If the tale is true, the idea worked and to this day the tap and the decaying bathtub continue to do their jobs—dripping and distributing.

But there could be other plausible reasons for the tub’s existence including a trough for cattle during the old homestead days, or a clever student art installation. If you know something we don’t, send your own tub tale to magazine@twu.ca.