No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life

It Doesn't Just Happen

It Doesn’t Just Happen One Wyoming night, as I tried to sleep above our busy street, a howling roar penetrated through my earplugs. I sat up and looked look out the window . Two men knelt beside a city utility truck in the center of the avenue, holding a huge hose and peering into the manhole to the waste line. With an evil grin and a clear conscience, I drifted back to sleep. Some of my neighbors were paying for their sins or learning from their mistakes. As a graduate of several advanced septic tank seminars, I felt a teensy bit smug until I realized that because this is a city, they don’t have to clean up after themselves, so they will not necessarily become more responsible. When Jerry and I moved into our old house, we planned to do a lot of the remodeling ourselves. Jerry had done considerable carpentry work, and I was an experienced gopher and general handy-person. We spent several evenings examining the oddities of the house and planning changes. In a basement bathroom, a toilet stood on a raised platform, deftly tucked in beside a shower and a tiny, triangular, antique sink. “One of the first things I’m going to do,” Jerry said, “is tear that toilet out and plug the line.” When I pointed out how handy it would be while I did laundry and he built furniture in the basement, he shook his head and reminded me of the Great Sewage Flood. On that occasion, I’d driven down from South Dakota for the weekend, but he didn’t answer my knock on the door. I found him slumped in the backyard, watching a sump pump pour sludge into the alley. Something had blocked the main city waste line running down the alley behind his 126 Nn n o p la c e li ke h ome house, so the waste backed up the pipeline, following the path of least resistance into the lowest area available: his basement. Two feet of subdivision slime flowed into his workshop and a room containing the exotic woods he’d been buying for years to make furniture and art projects. The gunk flowed around antique stoves, woodworking tools, stacks of stained glass. Wearing gloves to protect ourselves from contamination, we spent two days pumping the ooze out and hauling most of the furniture, wood, books, magazines, and records to the dump. This time when he said, “No toilet in the basement,” I nodded. A few nights later, coming home from a movie, we heard an ominous gurgling. In the basement bathroom, raw sewage bubbled over the edges of the toilet like lava. Jerry swore while I raced for buckets, rags, and the telephone. By the time I’d called a plumber who said he’d come by—first thing in the morning—Jerry was trying to unlock the side door, our closest route to the back alley. None of the keys we’d gotten from the realtor worked on that lock, so Jerry broke it with a hammer and chisel, and started hauling buckets of gunk outside. In the house next door, a man yanked a window up and bellowed curses about the noise. I called out an apology and added, in reasonable tones, that the basement toilet was backing up, and that we’d had to break the door down. He slammed the window and, as long as he was up anyway, went to the bathroom. I know that because I was standing behind Jerry when I heard the toilet flush next door. As Jerry bent to dip up another bucket of sewage from our toilet, fresh waste shot two feet in the air past his nose. He howled curses as he ran for the stairs, but I managed to convince him the man knew not what he did. We spent the rest of the night hauling guck outside and moving possessions upstairs. By morning, we knew far too much about the health and habits of our neighbors. When the plumber came the next day, he found a cleanout valve in the soil line just inside the basement wall and ran a power auger into it. While goo emerged from the line into a bucket, he explained that all the houses on the street were connected to a single waste line laid through It Doesn’t Just Happen Nn 127 the...