Long-time Mt. Rainier resident Ralph Ingerstrom and his ox contemplate an uncertain future.

Mt. Rainier, March 1 — A sharp decline in public services has left Mt. Rainier residents passing the long winter nights in the olden ways: whittling, fetching water, and wife-swapping.

“I swapped my wife for this here team of oxen,” says Ralph Ingerstrom, 61, stopping on his way down 34th St. to pat the steaming necks of his long-horned Ayrshires. “Next big storm, I’m gonna hitch’em up and plough my street. Cain’t wait no more.”

Olaf Grundersson, 98, remembers the days when the streets were cleared of snow and houses had indoor plumbing.

“It were around the time of McKinley’s funeral,” recalls Grundersson, sucking on his whiskers. “We’d never seen snow before. By golly, soon’s it fell out the sky, the city bought a mechanical steam shovel and cleared the roads, lickety-split.”

To prove to visitors that Mt. Rainier once enjoyed running water, Grundersson shows them the bathroom of his modestly appointed Taylor St. bungalow.

“Right here,” he says, pointing to the faucet. “The water came out right here.”

“I like to tease the youngsters with that,” he chuckles. “They don’t believe me. They say, ‘Grandpa Grundersson, water don’t come out the wall. You’re nothing but a senile old man.'”

Across town, Mary Lemm, 27, waits patiently in line at the public spring at 33rd and Shepherd, a brood of squalling, unbathed children at her side.

“Seems as if I recollect,” she says, wearily, “the days when I didn’t have to carry a 30lb bucket of water several miles through snowdrifts.”

“It’s just the Lord’s punishment, that’s what it is,” she concludes, lifting her rusty pail with arthritis-crippled fingers to catch the trickle of icy water.

Local clergy echo Lemm’s concerns.

“The people of Mt. Rainier are a stiff-necked people, and they have incurred the wrath of God,” says Pastor Michael Tom Yoland of the First Church of Molten Rock on Rhode Island Ave. “Great shall be their suffering. Great.”

As they crowd into the town hall for a community gathering, other Mt. Rainier residents express similar sentiments.

“Streets not ploughed, can’t get to work, and no water to be had,” says Otis McRudden, 51, standing beside a shabby black wooden box from which, tradition prescribes, each resident must extract a folded scrap of paper.

“Payin’ taxes don’t work. Payin’ the water bills don’t work. Gettin’ the right kind of garbage can don’t work. We must appease the angry spirits,” McRudden adds, his pocket bulging with stones.