The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Mama said there’d be days like this. You get up on a sunny hopeful morn, you take your shower, brush your teeth, wash the breakfast dishes, toss in a load of laundry, help yourself to another cup of joe. You’re psyched for another day in the mine, just glad to be alive. You go back in the bathroom, get rid of those first two cups of caffeine … and hear the sink gurgling like a bad gargle. Odd, you think. The kitchen sink chimes in, a drain duet. Then you noticed the toilet water isn’t going down, it’s coming up!

What the …? And then you find the bathtub filling up … with … omigod! With what should never be in your bathtub.

Who ya gonna call? Crapbusters? Being a modern South Ender, I postpone my optimism and pull the shades down on the mocking sun. Ain’t no sunshine when the sewage comes home to roost, trust me. Then I go to my computer and google up Invasion of the Turds, pass up the first ads and go to the How-To and You-Tube and the Suicide Hotline. I pick the How-To. The Hotline will come later, I’m half certain, but it’s a last resort. I have the internet — I have a global support team.

I’m no novice to this plumbing paradox, I pretty much know the bad news that’s coming. I’m just hoping to find a glimmer of hope, some yahoo who sez check the toilet float, jiggle it, you’ll be good to go. My ‘team’ focuses instead on more likely and infinitely worse diagnoses: a plugged sewer line, a ruined drainfield or a full septic tank. Pick yer poison! The tank was pumped recently so I’m down to 2 options. I choose the only one I can fix myself — the line.

That was yesterday. I started at the tank and dug down, found the line a few feet down, then trenched back toward the house. An old growth forsythia thwarted my forward progress. I sawed it off, whacked at its roots, chained it to my truck and jerked it out like a bad wisdom tooth. Sure I felt bad. For me! Its roots were what had clogged my line where the pipes had broken. Iron to clay to PVC. It was like an archeological dig through plumbing eras, Roman to modern.

Today I joined the new pipes, ran some serious water as a test then filled the grave. I tell you, there’s a damn good reason to keep the old outhouse!

My shack’s sink has been plugged up for a couple of years and no amount of Draino or reaming with a snake or the power of prayer has opened up that damn drain. I checked the Building Codes for just running the grey water into a bucket beneath a pipe that exits the bathroom in the back and I didn’t see anything to preclude that option. Course, I didn’t look too hard. And here at the outskirts of Rome’s Reach, I figure that’s close enough.

A buddy visited recently and noticed our new kitchen sink up at the hacienda which, since he’d had a vicious encounter with the gods of plumbing, caused him to ask if I’d installed the thing myself. He obviously has forgotten he ever met me in an earlier life. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Only took two or three days, about par for me and my skill set. Why do you ask?’ Seems he’d had a leaky drain pipe under his sink and so, being a male of the species, decided to, you know, take a few minutes and fix that drip. Ho ho. Ha ha. Whee hoo, now here’s a fellow inmate who hasn’t really familiarized himself with the Laws of Plumbing. He thinks, innocently enough, naively enough, that plumbing must be fairly straightforward. Simple even. The Gods of Plumbing love us guys, so trusting, so completely unaware, such easy pickings. We are naught but toys in their cruel and capricious hands.

How did that drip repair turn out? I asked and waited for a long and terrible saga of busted pipes, spewing water, multiple trips to the hardware store or the emergency room or both. “Oh’, he said nonchalantly. ‘I tried straightening out the drain pipe where it was a bit crooked and before you know it, I broke the thing off in the wall where it was impossible to reach.’ So what did you do? I asked, still expecting a variation on my own typical plumbing horror story. ‘I ran into a plumber and I had him finish the job.’

This is probably the correct and proper ending for these stories. Hire a pro. Get a real job and pay the money. Forget your stupid pride, admit defeat and move on. This, I will tell you one more time, is NOT the South End Way. Certainly it is not MY way. I do not bow down to the sadism of plumbing deities. Sure, I bleed, I weep, I throw myself down on the sink floorboards and wail, I break tools, I break pipes, I break my back. Of course I want to quit. Of course it’s the only logical alternative. So what? If that were the Point, I’d move back to the city, buy a wardrobe and a tie to match, interview for real employment and join the mainstream.

I … am … not … going … back … to … that … America. Not even when Trump makes it great again. And no rusted pipe, corroded drain, busted waterline or anything else the Plumbing Gods can throw in my way will make me do it. No sir! Not even if I slowly have to devolve toward a shack with only cold water from a dripping faucet and a drainpipe into a hole in the ground. Not even if I end up back with my old outhouse behind the shop. There are things far worse than outdoor toilets, trust me.