You Won’t Believe This, But ‘Impromptu Metal Snake’ Is the Name of My Black Oak Arkansas Tribute Band. But I Digress

Sewer 101: Wear all the gloves in the house. Then drink the bleach.

And so now we must get on with it. We sent an impromptu metal snake down the cleanout we’d discovered. It’s just a metal wire we use to “fish” electrical cable through wall cavities. I have a metal snake that’s made especially for sewer drains, but it’s much bigger, so it’s harder to clean off after you pull it back out. The wrong thing is often the right thing under the right circumstances. The poopoo porridge showing in the pipe was vile, and I wanted to keep it under control until I made it go away completely.

The metal snake hit a solid obstruction at seven feet in. I knew immediately what that was. The vitreous clay pipe must make a 90-degree turn just outside the house, where it went either left or right and headed off to the town’s sewer main. At this point, it really didn’t matter which way it went. I had to make the turn and keep going. There’s no sense worrying about things that don’t matter. There are more important things to keep you occupied when you’re mucking about in what amounts to a toilet that saves everything like a demented Christmas Club. I still don’t care where the poop goes. I just want it to go there and leave me alone. I have the same opinion of the guys that sell frozen steaks door to door.

The first ten-foot section of sewer auger cable will easily reach the T fitting where the pipe turns and runs away. I know it’s a T fitting, and not a sweep, because that’s probably the only fittings the pipe installers had back in the day. Vitreous clay pipe is great stuff, and it’s plenty durable, but it’s like a Model T. It comes in one color and a few different shapes and sizes and that’s it. I’ve never even seen a sweep fitting out in the wild. They probably used the T fitting to allow a cleanout at the turn, which is good plumbing practice, but someone’s buried that one, too, sometime over the last hundred years. Or maybe they knew that putting the cleanout inside the house, just before the tee, was smarter for winter work. Whatever. I can deal with it.

The sewer drill came with a battered metal case filled with medieval torture devices disguised as end fittings for the sewer cables. I chose the goofiest-looking one from the bunch. It was a bendy one-foot spring with a nasty-looking spike on the end shaped like a spade on a deck of cards. I clicked it onto the first length of auger cable, and then shoved it by hand into the pipe until it hit the turn. Then we hooked it up to the machine, said a poopy prayer, and turned it on.

The machine is quiet, which I appreciated. I sat on a pilfered plastic milk crate next to the pipe while my son operated the machine according to my various grunts. After a while I just pointed. The machine is so simple as to defy description. It has a switch right on the motor that reads FORWARD and REVERSE, and a button on the end of a cable that you depress to turn it on and off. That’s it.

I was unable to wear any form of waterproof or insulated glove, because I was the man in the hole. The cable consists of an outer, spring-like sheath, and an inner cable that looks like BX cable sheathing. Both the inside and outside cables spin when the motor runs, and if you don’t hold onto it it begins to whip around like a robot that wants you to jump rope. If you wear any sort of rubberized, form-fitting glove, the outer spring cable will immediately grab it and crush all the fingers on your hand that it can’t remove cleanly before you can tell your son to lay off the button. You’re required to wear leather-palmed, loose fitting gloves, and let the cable lay in the crook between your thumb and index finger. When things are going well, you can tuck the cable under your boot in the void of your arch. I’ve been writing for two weeks about mucking out a blocked sewer line in my frozen basement, so if you don’t mind, I’ll just skip over any mention of things “going well’ for the foreseeable future. Thanks for your understanding.

While you’re advancing the cable, you need to hold on to the cable or the whipping motion will knock out a tooth or two, which wouldn’t be so bad, I guess. I’d finally fit in at the checkout line at the Walmart if that happened. However, when you put the machine on REVERSE and start backing it out of the primordial soup, the simple dentistry it offers comes with a hepatitis shower instead of the complimentary lollipop that most DDS offices hand out. I held on to that cable like grim death while it spun, I can assure you.

The vitreous clay pipe pipe is like baked concrete. It’s really tough stuff. I wouldn’t have been able to use the nasty-looking flail attachment if the pipe was made of less durable material. After the cable bottomed out at the T, we hooked it up to the auger and let it rip.

The Electric Eel is like a lawn mower. You turn it on, the cable spins, and you and push the machine forward to keep pressure on the line. The cable just spun for a good long time, flopping this way and that inside the pipe. My son kept even pressure on it while I tried to hang on to the cable. It was another of those moments when I knew that I’d be beaten if it didn’t find its way around the corner. My sewer repair was like trying to hit on a roulette wheel seventeen times in a row. This was something like the thirteenth successful spin at this point, and I began to wonder if the big croupier in the sky was going to reach under the table and press the “you’ve won enough button” that casinos seem to install on all the tables.

Waiting to see if that cable would find its way around the corner was as nerve-wracking as any procedure that doesn’t end in uttering, “I do.”
[to be continued]

In a Fascinating Coincidence, ‘Tool Rental Faux Pas’ Is Also the Name of My World Party Tribute Band. But I Digress

I nimbly recovered from my tool rental faux pas. I asked the rental dude how business was going, and he unloaded on me like a Home Depot toilet. Winter is the wrong time of year for construction in Maine, but that was the least of his woes, apparently. No one was doing nothing, he said, and I understood the grammar and the sentiment. I could have said or done any number of unpleasant things to him, accidentally or not, and he still would have been nice to me. I was renting something when no one else was, and by asking about his livelihood I was saving him big money on psychotherapy.

I rented the Electric Eel, and signed up for 50 feet of cable. The cables for a drain auger come in 10-foot sections. They have a simple, durable, and foolproof mechanism for joining them together. There’s a spring-loaded button you depress, which allows you to push two fixed pins in slots on the end of the last section. When it’s fully inserted, you twist it to lock it in, and the spring-loaded pin pops out to make it impossible for it to come loose unless the pin is depressed again.

If a section of cable became detached in use, you’d be totally boned. There would be no practical way to retrieve it, short of excavating the pipe and busting it open. The ground around here can freeze four or five feet deep in the winter, and I knew that if I lost a piece down the pipe, I might as well put the family in the car and drive away from the home forever. A tool rental house is like a weird, useful version of a Blockbuster Video. Remember paying $79 for an overdue VHS tape that cost $9 to buy outright? Yeah, it’s like that.

I marveled at how simple the coil attachment device was, and wondered about the engineer who must have designed it. Now there was a person who knew how the world worked. There was a man who knew that increasing complexity rarely improves outcomes. There was a fellow who knew that most tools will be operated by personnel who aren’t going to read the instructions. There was a guy who knew that performance in a laboratory doesn’t equal performance in the field. There was a dude who was probably dead, I thought. Nobody who walks the Earth thinks like that.

For listening to his tale of rental woe, the clerk, who I suspect was also the owner, gave me three extra lengths of cable for free on the way out the door. He had no fear that anyone else would rent it, because business was a-mouldering in the grave. He figured he might as well have one satisfied customer, because he was only going to get one shot at a satisfied customer all day. I was.

We had to get cracking the minute we got home. I couldn’t really afford a two-day rental. Also, my eyes were turning brown. We were immediately confronted with one of the reasons we didn’t call a plumber, besides pauperism. There is easy access to the sub-basement through big double doors in the back of my house. All that was necessary was for me to remove a five-foot-deep, glaciated pile of snow from the driveway that leads down there. We abandon that part of our parking area in the winter because we shovel by hand, and it would be stupid to even attempt the steeply sloped, long driveway. We park in front of the house, and we throw the snow over the railing onto the pavement leading down to the back. I might not be able to budge the pile with a front end loader after it’s been sitting in subzero temps for a while. I don’t even have a front end loader. I’ve been meaning to buy my wife one for her birthday, and then borrow it from her, but I’ve never gotten around to it. So with some slipping and sliding and Anglo-Saxon words, we managed to carry the tools up and over the arete of snow, and set up shop in the basement.

First things first. Let’s stop the bleeding. I had purchased a big long length of corrugated drainage pipe. It was one of the long list of things the Home Despot clerk told me was the  wrong thing for what I was doing. I then took a plastic fitting that the clerk nearly pulled out of my hand when I picked it up, because that didn’t fit in with his plans for my project, either. I almost had to shoplift it to get it out of the store, but eventually he relented and decided to let me, a damn fool if he ever saw one, buy the thing. It was a step-down fitting designed to attach plumbing pipe to drainage pipe. I turned it around backwards, and put the corrugated pipe over the small end instead of inside the large end like it was intended to work, an approach that I was led to understand wouldn’t work because you’re wearing an orange apron and I’m not.

Then I took two big hose clamps that are totally wrong for my situation, and put them around the outside of the pipe and the fitting, and I socked them down hard, which I realize is all wrong because reasons. Then I disconnected the sewer main about four feet above the floor, and I slipped the large end of the wrong fitting the wrong way over the wrong kind of pipe, which fit perfectly. Then I ran the coil of drain pipe across the floor, out the doors, and across the parking area to the grassy area in the back yard.

Then, I can assure you, I did not instruct my lovely wife that it was OK to run the washer and flush the toilet full of piddle if she needed to, because that would have totally turned the back yard into a Superfund site. That kind of groundwater pollution would have been totally unlike washing a car in the driveway and having six of your neighbors’ dogs take a wiz on the lawn.

[to be continued]

No Word of Lie: ‘Rest Room Snickers’ Is the Name of My Haircut 100 Tribute Band. But I Digress

You know what they say: Heir today, gone tomorrow.

We didn’t really drive through a blizzard to go fetch plumbing stuff. It was a garden-variety snowstorm for February. There was six or eight inches of snow, followed by rain, with a subzero chaser. The snowy porridge it produced on the road was worse than ice. It was like icy grease. I drive an old van. It doesn’t weigh enough in the back when it’s not full of stuff, and it likes to skate. My son and I skated all the way to to the store.

I never understood why Einstein insisted on all that Red Shift nonsense back in 1923 to prove his Special Theory of Relativity. He could have proved that certain circumstances could make lengths appear to contract and time seem to slow down by standing on the side of the road while watching me drive sideways two miles for every one mile I went forward. I can assure you that when you’re looking out the windshield at the sidewalk, then look out the side window to see the road ahead, time isn’t an important constant. Whee!

By the time we made it to the Home Despot, we were in another weather zone where it had been raining all day and the ground was bare. My Number One son and I went into the store looking like a couple of overdressed ragamuffins. I called him my Number One son because no one was allowed to deposit any Number Two in the toilet for two days now. While we were wandering in the plumbing aisle, he got a notion. “I’ll be right back, Dad.” No further explanation needed. I picked out all the plumbing stuff I needed well before he returned, even though I needed a lot of oddball things and it took some hunting around to find it all.

When he returned, he had a combination beatific/confused look on his face. I knew he had downloaded all his data on Home Despot’s porcelain hard drive, hence the beatific look. He explained the confused look. “Dad, I was in the men’s room, and another man entered at the same time as me, and he went into the other stall holding a Snickers bar. When I was washing my hands, he came out of the stall without the Snickers bar. Dad, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”

Son, we’re dirty, but that’s only because we’ve been working hard in a tough spot. Our clothes have no style, and are threadbare, but that’s only because we’re poor, not because we spent all our money on getting high, takeout pizza, and cable TV. We live in a hovel because it’s all we can afford, but it’s still a home, and a home is an important engine of salubrity for a family. It’s not because we don’t know Martha Stewart from Paula Deen. You’re dressed like a clown in the septic circus, and I look like the ringmaster. But I can assure you that it’s perfectly OK for you to say to yourself, in a very snobby interior voice, “Well, we’re one step from being street urchins, but at least we don’t eat Snickers bars in public toilets.”

Back in the plumbing aisle, the clerks kept coming over to help. I hate help. I’m too polite from years of nuns whacking at me with rulers to say no thanks. I blurt out what I’m looking for, and wince, because I know what’s coming.The clerks tell me, “That won’t work. That won’t fit, you want this other toy thing that costs a lot and breaks when it’s dragged over the scanner during checkout. It’s very eco.”

No, I don’t. Just once I’d like to tell them what I’m thinking, but honestly, that’s a poor reflection on me, not them. They’re just trying to help. I’m afraid that someday I’m going to snap and say, “Why don’t you go eat a Snickers in the public bathroom.” I’m only human.

After stocking up on the oddest assortment of plumbing supplies you could conjure up, we went to the rental yard, where I promptly insulted the desk clerk. I didn’t mean to. He had done nothing to deserve being told to eat a Snickers bar in a grotty place. I said something self-deprecating, but managed to get deprecate all over the poor fellow by accident.

I was at the counter filling out the forms to get my Electric Eel and pipe breaker. During a lull in the action, I looked around the showroom and noticed that I knew, intimately, what every single piece of equipment was for, even though it was all unlabeled. This was a rental house for commercial construction jobs. It had big hammers and pavement slitters and various other tools of destruction that have chapped my hands and my ass at one time or another. I noticed my son looking around the place, and caught him wondering what the hell all this weird stuff was for. So in my ignorance, I said to him, “Son, if you know what everything in this room is for, you’ve had a very bad life.”

The clerk was not amused.

[to be continued]

Amusingly, ‘The Electric Eel’ Is the Name of My B.W. Stevenson Tribute Band. But I Digress

Notice: This tool will look this clean and shiny until it has been used for fifteen minutes. Then it will look like the inside of King Kong’s adult diaper forevermore.

No, “getting an electric eel” is not a euphemism, although it has the makings of a great one. What I’m referring to is a tool that is known by many different names. Some call it a drain cleaner, others call it a drain auger. Some refer to it by the manufacturer’s name, the way Kleenex or Google or iPad is used to refer to any version of a thing, not just one brand. Electric Eel makes good sewer augers. I wanted one.

It doesn’t make any sense to own a real drain cleaner unless you’re a plumber. The number of times the problem comes up is so small that buying one outright will never pay off. If you have a snake and a plunger, you can take care of the occasional Chipotle overload in your toilet, or a tub drain that’s got a Trump in it. If your sewer needs help, you need a great, big, powered thing to get anywhere. I needed a great big thing.

Where to get one was the question. I live in to-hell-and-gone Maine. The nearest Home Despot is over an hour from here, and I don’t even consider Home Despot a good hardware store. It’s more like a bad department store. I guess it’s kind of snobby of me. If you ignore the Levelor blinds, the New-Jersey-mobster-patterned area rugs, and all the clerks, you can find what you need to fix most anything among the weirdness. Home Despot even rents sewer drills, or says they do. Unfortunately, the one closest to me still isn’t close enough to actual civilization to bother renting them. I’d have to drive two hours, one way, to get one. They rent it by the half-a-day, so I’d be forced to turn around and return the tool as soon as I got it home. I’m not too bright, but I assumed I’d have to turn it on for a few minutes to get any benefits from it. I looked for another solution to the problem.

I checked the Intertunnel. Maine’s funny. Almost no one has a functioning website. If they do have one, it looks like a MySpace page from 1995. It’s got glitter fonts and a beckoning finger and the little stick figure with the shovel that says COMING SOON. A lot of businesses are simply a phone number on one of those dot biz websites that Google defaults to if you’re searching for someone in the witness protection program and there’s nothing else to show you.

I found a rental house not too far from the nearest Home Despot that had large-scale sewer augers. They also had a medieval-looking tool that you can use to break off vitrified clay sewer pipe cleanly. It’s a massive chain on a steel bar that you wrap around the pipe and then tighten until the pressure shears the pipe. It works on cast iron, too. I sat down and pictured everything pipe-ish we might need to finish the job, and made a list for the Home Despot. We’d get everything in one trip, or die trying. That turned out to be less of an exaggeration than I’d prefer.

I know I’ve been writing about this sewer clog so long that the first few installments have turned yellow and fallen out of copyright, but I fixed the whole thing, soup to nuts, in two days. Day one was figuring out what was going on and planning for day two, when all the work would be completed, or else. Planning is important.

If you are required to drive for hours in a car to get what you need, and you can’t afford to buy anything extra, it focuses your mind, or it should, anyway. Having things handy breeds laziness. I have next to no money and no time available, and I absolutely cannot fail or we’d be homeless in the winter. I had to make sure I didn’t forget anything.

I was a construction project manager at one time. I’ve managed many more of that type of critter as well. The job teaches you to form a mental picture of the entire process for any assigned task in order to list the money, time, material, and labor that will be required to complete a job. That’s why experience is so important in a job like that. The world has to be fundamentally, physically, measurably different at the end of the day if you’re in the construction biz. How many jobs in today’s economy require that?

My current construction jobs are very easy to project manage. I have no time and no money and no help available except my son. That cuts down on paperwork. All I need to figure out is how to pinch what few pennies I can scrape together (by begging) until they scream. My Gantt chart has one bar: Fix sewer. The bar is one day long.

With the cleanout pipe discovered, it was time for my son and I to head off in my truck, directly into a blizzard.

[to be continued]

Don’t Laugh. ‘Light Dawns Over Marblehead’ Is the Name of My Moulty and the Barbarians Tribute Band. But I Digress

Why did someone call me a genius in yesterday’s comments? Is this like when you choose the ugliest girl as the homecoming queen, and then snicker behind her back? Yeah, sure thing, “genius.” I may not be a sooper gene ee us like Sippican, but at least I’m pooping indoors.

My behavior didn’t feel very genius-y to me. I found it to be an example of something we used to call: Light dawns over Marble Head. 

I was born in Massachusetts. That means that if I live in Maine for the next 140 years, I’ll be from Massachusetts. That’s the way they roll up here. I’m a Massh*le, and will never shed the mark of Cain, and Cain’s potato chips. I can bear up under the shame of it. Eventually maybe they’ll soften a bit, and say, “He ain’t half bad for a flatlander, I tell you what.” I’d settle for that. But I’ll probably say some Massachusetts-grade thing like: Light Dawns Over Marble Head, and they’ll reset the clock.

Marblehead is a town on the North Shore in Massachusetts. It fronts the Atlantic, and it’s full of boats and people with whales on their pants. When I was younger, and worked construction with the kind of guys you see depicted banging nails on Mr. Blandings dream house, they’d often say, “Light dawns over Marblehead,” after they figured something out. It wasn’t a self-compliment. It meant you had been a bit dense for a while, but eventually, light dawned over marble…

Explaining jokes ruins them, doesn’t it? The point is, eventually even I catch on. Let’s look at someone smarter than me. Look what Matt had to say in the comments. It smacks of figuring out something unseen:

The ear worm in the room is the sudden realization this main appears to
be intended to drain in the direction of the street, out the front of
the house, beneath a pile of dirt that is some two stories higher than
the Igor-spec basement slab. No way. This thing has to make a 90deg turn
somewhere uphill of the clean-out and sensibly make its way back
downhill once clear of the side of the house. When the old girl was
built, the toilet must have been “too close in the summer and too far in
the winter”. Where would the presumed retrofit have emptied? Is there a
creek out back? So many questions.

Well, like any good MacGuffin story, I think Matt has stumbled on the answer by following a false trail that leads to clear thinking. He’s assuming that the sewer drain wouldn’t be buried that deep in the street out in front of my house. My house is two stories high in the front, and four stories high in the back, so that makes a lot of sense. Making sense will get you into trouble in these parts. There was a problem with the sewer main a quarter-mile or so down the street a year or two ago, and they dug a hole thirty feet deep to fix it. Anything is possible, as Colonel Steiner says in another good movie where you’re supposed to root for the bad guys a little.

When I bought this house for a little under 25 grand, I got a free house lot. No one intended to give me a free house lot. The realtor said it wasn’t included. It was on the deed, lady. You should totally read those things. Totally. Someone had intended to build a house in my back yard about fifty or sixty years ago. Unlike real estate agents and wedding photographers, I perform due diligence when a house is going to change hands. They had plotted out a street that would have been punched through to make the landlocked lot in my backyard a viable houselot. Of course, the mill town I live in has been in an inexorable decline since the day the ink was wet on that plan. No one has built a house in this town since disco. They didn’t put in a street, but I bet they put in the sewer main, and I bet they hooked my house up to it. Out back.

So I’m incredibly lucky. The sewer line is made from really durable stuff that I understand really well. Vitrified clay sewer pipe is awesome. It’s really strong, and it’s impervious to all the really dumb things I assume have been sent down the drains over the years. I’m trying to picture why someone would want a sink in the sub-subbasement so badly they’d bury the sewer cleanout to get it. I doubt they were pouring Perrier down it. People will dump anything into a town sewer. A lot of looped and loopy people have lived in my house before I wandered in, so their imagination is certain to trump my experience in these matters. I may find out they flushed a mattress or a Buick or a chesterfield or a gallon of roofing tar or forty gallons of goat’s head soup down the drain over the years.

Whatever the problem, I’m bound to find it. I’m off to get an electric eel.

[to be continued]