Interestingly, ‘Confined Space Entry’ Is the Name of My Village People Tribute Band. But I Digress

Overheard while a plumber worked in my house 30 years ago: Drain traps and venting are for pussies! Sewer gas builds character! Let’s rock!

So the “water” coming out of the pipe coming out of the floor has slowed to a trickle. Now what?

We can’t go to bed and worry about it tomorrow. I won’t stuff a rag in the broken pipe and call it a day. That pipe has to be sealed off pretty well, because it’s potentially dangerous, not because it’s unpleasant. The average person really doesn’t understand sewers or septic systems. It’s just as well. Poking around in there can get you killed. The common, sensible reaction to a sewer problem is, “Ew, poo.” Poo is no fun, but it probably won’t kill you. I’ve engaged the services, directly or indirectly, of hundreds of plumbers. They wallow in poo all day long. I noticed that it didn’t make them terrific ballroom dancers, or witty at dinner parties, but it didn’t fit them for toe tags, either. Poo is nothing special. Sewer gas is lethal.

I once summoned a plumber to a filling station to snake out a clogged drain. He dutifully sent his drain auger down the toilet, reeled it out thirty feet or so, and discovered a diaper someone had flushed down the john. As he reeled the snake back in, he passed it between his ungloved thumb and forefinger.  He wanted to scrape off the residue of the disreputable things that get flushed down a gas station toilet. It was his favorite drain snake, and he liked to put it away clean. He must have noticed a modestly horrified look on my face.

“You get used to it after a while.”

There are some things I’d rather not get used to, thanks. I have to admit that poo doesn’t smell all that bad, at least when compared to other things I’ve encountered underground. For instance, every fast food restaurant has a big kitchen sink. It’s a stainless steel job with a spray head depending over it. You wouldn’t think you’d need a big wash station in a place that puts food in a paper bag and throws it at you through a hole in the wall. You’d think wrong. There’s always something that need cleaning in any restaurant. Most restaurants are located in places where a bunch of people live, so they rarely handle their own sewage onsite. Town sewer is available and mandatory. Restaurants are required to do various things to their effluent before they’re allowed to dump it into the town sewer, however.

Back to the sink. Underneath the sink, buried in the floor, is a big grease trap. A city sewer system hates grease. The slogan at the base of the Sewer Statue of Liberty reads: Give us your pooped, your piss poor, your tangled masses of toilet paper yearning to swim free, the wretched refuse of your Happy Meal, but stop dumping grease down the drain you jerk.

The typical grease trap in a McPtomaine’s is maybe a couple of feet wide, a couple of feet deep, and perhaps four feet long. The top of it is flat, and it’s set just above the level of the concrete slab. When tile is laid atop the concrete, the top of the trap is level with the finished floor. It’s got a diamond-plate lid that’s bolted down hard — for a good reason. Its contents are the foulest smelling thing in the world.

It’s hard to describe the smell of a rancid grease trap to a civilian. Opening up a neglected grease trap is like sorting out corpses after a mustard gas attack on a Passchendaele trench. That was my grandfather’s job, by the way. The trench sorting, not cleaning out grease traps. So anyway, a little poop never hurt anyone. The sewer you send it down can kill you, however.

Sewers are home to sewer gas. Sewer gas is dangerous stuff. Way back when, I had to get a confined space certificate or license or credential or merit badge or some such appellation added to my curriculum vitae. When you build big things, the sewer systems get really big, and you
occasionally have to climb into them. Sometimes they’re not showroom
fresh. By the time I got a license to enter confined spaces, the only confined space I entered was my wife’s car, but whatever. I was required to nominally supervise people who climbed into all sorts of unpleasant places. The government figured it was important for me to know more about the topic than the people in the hole for some reason. I generally waited in the car with the heater on while they climbed into the nasty concrete underground vault, but rules is rules. 

Sewer gas is like a motorcycle gang. Most members of motorcycle gangs are harmless. Most sewer gas just smells like the potpourri in Satan’s powder room. No big deal dealing with either of them. However, you always need to keep in mind that one guy in a hundred in the biker gang might be a stone cold killer, and one sewer gas exposure in a thousand might kill you instantly. The problem lies in the fact that the harmless kind look exactly the same as the lethal kind.

[to be continued]

Interestingly, ‘Loo Lagoon’ Is the Name of My Linda Ronstadt Tribute Band. But I Digress

Hey, mister; did you really buy this house? Yes. Yes I did. I think it was formerly owned by Hitler’s pool man.

Let’s stop waxing philosophical and get down to brass tacks. Poopy brass tacks. My plumbing was installed by Helen Keller and maintained for a century by the Shirk Brothers. My house was inhabited for a goodly portion of its long history by stoners, drunks, and pyromaniacs. Wondering what was flushed down that toilet over the years could turn me to drink, medical marijuana, and arson, now that I consider it. But I don’t have time for any of that. A geyser of excrement must be dealt with in the here and now.

I didn’t care exactly what the problem was. That might sound dumb, but only if you’re never been in a leaky boat. First, you bail. Then you plug the hole. Thirdly, after the morning ration of grog and cheese the next day, you wonder where the hole came from. It was ten at night on a Sunday, we were already really tired from our HVAC exertions, and the only thing to do was stop the bleeding.

You’ll have to trust me when I tell you I know more about a sewer line than the average person. If you’re the average person, I’d like to take this opportunity to finally shake your hand. I’ve heard so much about you over the years. Then I’d like to caution you to wash your hand with bleach because I’ve been mucking about in sewage systems.

I’ve broken into dozens and dozens of sewer lines, and repaired them. That’s because I’ve built or renovated a lot of structures out there in the real world. Structures that the average person just drives past or poops in without another thought. I’ve inspected many more than I’ve actually mucked about in, too. Take a piddle in the closed end of Gillette Stadium? Do more than rest at a Rest Area on half the Mass Pike? Flush a moist towelette down the john in the ladies room of the gas station at the Belvidere Oasis outside Chicago? Pour paint down the sink in the gingerbread house in Fairhaven, or flush an adult diaper down the crapper at the senior center in Bellingham, Mass? Scoot into the Martha’s Vineyard Post Office to throw up last night’s clam bellies and appletinis after the ferry ride? Yeah, I know where that goes. Believe you me, you don’t want to know.

I looked over the loo lagoon that had coalesced in my basement’s basement, and I had to make some quick decisions. What’s necessary in such situations is to think critically. Critical Thinking is now an official subject in college, high school, and in some grammar schools. That’s why no one knows how to do it anymore. Rearranging your prejudices to conform to the topic at hand might get you an “A” in school, but it won’t stop a geyser of excrement in the basement.

You have to know real facts to think critically. Critical thinking is choosing between competing factual facts, not introducing unfactual things as an alternative to reality. On top of that, many facts are true, but extraneous. You decide which to ignore and which to pay attention to. Every-other program on television is a lamebrain version of Sherlock Holmes, but the viewers never get any impression from the archetype other than acting like an imperious jerk is proof you’re smarter than everyone else. Acting like an imperious jerk in a ditch where sewage is spoken will get you a bouquet of fingers applied to your nose. Put a sock in it, college boy.

So here’s what we know that tells us how to behave:

• A sewer pipe is tested when installed with very low air or water pressure, but it’s never supposed to have any pressure in it after that
• A geyser of goo means it’s under pressure 
• We have town sewer. Pressure from a town sewer would be cataclysmic
• The pressure is coming from the house, not into the house, or the problem would appear upstairs, too. There was no geyser of excrement coming from the toilet. Thank goodness for small favors
• You’ve been told that lo-flow toilets, miserly sink faucets, and water-rationing showerheads will cut your water usage bigtime. They won’t
• In the same vein, your toilet went from having 5 gallons of water to 3 to 1.5 or something now. Whoopty
• Your clothes washer dumps between 30 and 50 gallons of water down the drain
• Our clothes washer was currently running
• A gallon of water weighs about 7 pounds
• Fifty gallons of water weighs about 350 pounds
• Tree-fitty pounds of pressure in a pipe that’s not supposed to have any pressure can result in deleterious effects on your plan to move excrement outside your house expeditiously
• Turn off the clothes washer, dear
• Geyser goes to sleep for the night

OK, so we’ve stopped the bleeding. Now we have to cauterize the wound. We’ve got a sheared off plastic knuckle glued in a rusty cast iron knuckle jammed into another cast iron knuckle that’s buried in a concrete floor. At 10 at night on Sunday in the middle of nowhere. What to do?

[to be continued] 

Interestingly, ‘Dented Wedding Photographer’ Is the Name of My Firefall Tribute Band. But I Digress

As it turns out, this plumbing did not function all that well in the long term. I’m shocked. This is my shocked face.

I posted a photograph of the sewer pipe in my basement’s basement yesterday. Well, I posted it on the Internet. I took the picture in my basement’s basement. English is durn tricky, ain’t it? The good news is, well, there is no good news. The bad news is that I took that picture five years ago or so when I bought my house. That’s the before picture. That’s when the old girl was firing on all cylinders. I was reminiscing about days of yore when poop went away forevermore. Or seemed to, anyway.

Everything in my house was a horror. I knew that. When we were “in the market,” as they say, we contacted realtors in Maine and assured them that we were only interested in houses that no one else would want. They never believed us. They wasted our time and theirs by showing us houses they thought were swell. I hated them, and they cost too much, a bad combination. Realtors always assume they have a live one on the line, and they figure they can sell anything to anyone by performing their avant-garde real estate fandango. They weave a tapestry of “potential” with flailing arms and incongruous superlatives in any dreary, squat, vinyl-sided split-level with the ceiling-fan-equivalent of Robespierre for anyone over six feet tall — which I am, and would like to stay that way. Listen, lady — I’m immune.

By the time we had gotten to the house we now inhabit, the realtor was like a beat dog when the paperboy is coming up the walk. She skulked around the corners of the rooms while my wife and I wordlessly looked around. I looked at things normal people don’t look at when buying a house: I looked at the house. After a long while of poking around, I told the realtor we were inclined to make an offer, which would be emailed to her. She looked desperate, and confused. I gather that if other humans say what I had just said, they immediately disappear forever because they’ve actually lost interest, and some other real estate Svengali gets hold of them and hoovers out their wallet. I find few people who understand a person in dead earnest anymore.

“Don’t you want to have a home inspector look at it first?”

The faith of this woman in a person with a trivial credential was heartwarming. It reminded me of an expression I’d seen before. If you’ve ever slaughtered a farm animal, you’ll recognize this look. It doesn’t matter if you’re feeding it or tending to it or killing it. It looks up at you with the same, dumb, trusting look whether you’re holding a puntilla or a bucket of corn: Are you my mommy? It’s not that dumb an assumption for an animal. At first you are their mommy, day after day. Then for one, brief moment, you are their god.

I did not bother to mention my bona fides to the realtor, because what’s the point? There was no way to impress her in the lingua franca of realtors. I wasn’t an exalted home inspector, a god among men, a real estate master race participant trophy winner deluxe. I was just some guy who, in recent memory, had $59 million in profit or loss responsibility for construction projects in a calendar year. I was licensed to build anything from a dog house to a skyscraper in Massachusetts, but hey, this was Maine, where true home inspection men bestrode the landscape like Colossus. I was once paid $135,000 to paint the inside of one house, but that wouldn’t impress a realtor who had just advised me about the transformation I could achieve by putting ceiling fans in every room in an abandoned house, in a climate that has zero cooling degree days every year. True, every room in the house already had a ceiling fan, but the realtor assured me I could replace them with new ones and spruce the place up. Think of what a home inspector could tell me!

I may have said, “My dear lady; a home inspector is engaged to determine if anything is wrong with a house before you purchase it. I can assure you that his services will not be required, because there is absofarginlutely nothing right with this house. Every atom of its being is corrupt and contemptible. There is a hole in the roof I can climb through, if I’m willing to be elbowed by squirrels on the way by. The electricity is borne on raw wires strung through the house like a Depression-era photo of an Arkansas dirt road. The boiler will not boil, and the walls do not wall out much of anything. The plumbing does not plumb, is not plumb, and cannot achieve anything plumbish. There is a box in the basement filled with 25 pounds of asbestos batting. The good paint is lead, and the bad paint, the part that shows, is the color of a Soviet battleship hull. The floors are concave and the pipes are convex. Most of the interior walls are covered with shingles for some reason, including the backsplash behind the stove. This house is an affront to the trees that were massacred to produce it.” It’s also possible I said, “No thanks.” I really can’t remember.

We offered less than twenty-five grand to the bank that owned the house. I told them the number was based solely on the shade the building threw on the ground, the only value I could find in it. It would take an atomic clock to measure the moment in time it took for them to say yes.

The home inspector did eventually come, however. I tried to insure the house, and the insurance company hired him and sent him over. He was a wedding photographer, and he had a very large dent in his head.

[to be continued]

Interestingly, ‘Geyser of Excrement’ Is the Name of My Tears for Fears Tribute Band. But I Digress

So, we’ve moved seamlessly from HVAC to plumbing. A very particular kind of plumbing — the sewer line. If you’ve ever done plumbing above the concrete regions of your house, you might figure plumbing holds no terrors. Lefty loosie, righty tightie, and wash your hands before eating lunch was the entire plumbing handbook when I was a kid. The appendix held one one additional piece of advice: Water always runs downhill. Wanna bet?

When the clocks run backwards, when the sun rises in the west, when the lion lays down with the lamb, when politicians start telling the truth, when water doesn’t run downhill, when the laws of supply and demand are revoked — supplying finless brown trout to the porcelain gods and demanding that they go away — that’s when you know you’re in for it. You got existential trouble there, Camus, I’m tellin’ you.

I don’t think I can accurately describe what that geyser of excrement in the carhole meant to me at that moment. It was literally an existential threat. If I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, almost immediately, we would be homeless. Not fake homeless like an indie-rock drummer sleeping on strange couches. My family and I would not be able, or more to the point, not be allowed to live in our house while I sorted it out. It’s fight or flee, and since it was below zero at the time, fleeing only lasts until you get to the end of the street where you re-enact the end of The Shining. I prefer fighting anyway.

The first thing you have to get through your head in such situations is that no one is going to save you. Everyone thinks they can act any old way and someone will save them. I eventually got help, but that’s not the same as waiting to be saved. The old joke about the lost traveler that sat down and prayed for God to save him is apropos. A man on a camel passes by, but he refuses a ride because God will save him. A man in a hot-air balloon floats by and throws down a rope. The traveler refuses, because God will save him. Things go along like that for quite some time. When the man is about to die of thirst and hunger, he entreats the Lord, “Why won’t you save me?” The heavens open up, and a figure in flowing robes appears in the clouds, and booms, “I sent a hot air balloon and a camel driver. What did you want, a sedan chair?”

If I wanted to be saved I’d go to snake-handling church. I had to fix my problem. I looked at my older son, and said, “Get it through your head, right now, son. No one will save us. Let’s save ourselves.” It was superfluous.

In the nether regions of the carhole, there was an old pipe, plastic, sheared off roughly, inexpertly glued into a 2-inch cast iron knuckle, which in turn was inelegantly rammed into another cast-iron knuckle, which disappeared into the concrete floor. Bad things were coming out of the sheared off plastic pipe. This pipe was as far away from the sewer main as you could get and still be indoors. Someone had decided they needed a sink really badly in this godforsaken, frozen sepulchre, and true to the task, had put one in really badly, then removed it. And now that pipe was jetting the equivalent of 175 meals eaten at a Chipotle franchise located on a Carnival Cruise ship onto my cellar floor every minute. Steps must be taken.

[to be continued]