Sewer Line Maintenance
My first house was located out in Redwood City, part of the southern peninsula making up the San Francisco Bay Area. It started life just after World-War II as a 1-bedroom, 1-bath house with an attached car port. By the time I bought it for probably about 100 times its original purchase price, it had been morphed into a 2-bedroom, 1 bath house with a living room (formerly the old carport) and a brand-new attached 2-car garage.
I bought the house on the advice of Klaus, my Peugeot-driving, chain-smoking German Zen Buddhist Priest real-estate agent. Seriously, he was all that, and more. My buddy Bill bought a house on Klaus's advice, too. One day when Klaus was out driving Bill around, they came across a cat that someone had run over moments before. Klaus stopped the car, leaped out, and gave the cat the Zen-Buddhist equivalent of last rites. He was quite a guy.
But back to the story: the real reason I bought the house was because the garage at 750 square feet, was not that much smaller than the rest of the house. It gave me somewhere to store all my motorbikes, it did. Plus, it had a giant back yard which meant that I could finally get a dog.
The big day came, and I moved away from 4 years of living in East Palo Alto, which was a pretty rough neighborhood back then in the late 1980's. I got my friends to help me move, as was the fashion before we all ended up accumulating too much junk to be able to help each other move. The move went pretty well, until my desert pal Glen became the first person to use my new bathroom. He came out and said, "Toilet's stuck. It's flooding the floor." He laughed.
I didn't.
This would be my introduction to home ownership. No landlord to call now: you're on your own. Armed with a phonebook, I discovered just how many pages are devoted to the subject of Plumbing in the Yellow Pages. I made a call. The Rescue Rooter crew came out and ran some giant twirling metal snake through the line. In time, they pronounced it all clear, relieved me of $170, and left.
This was to be the first of many times that I would be rescued by Rescue Rooter. It was probably at least once per year that they would show up, run their snake down the line, and relieve me of another $170.
These regularly occurring invoices were starting to add up, when one day, I spied a drain un-blocker on the shelf at the local hardware store. I forget the name of the thing now, but I remember that it claimed to have "pulsating action, guaranteed to unblock stubborn blockages". What could be finer? And at a cost of only $30, I could imagine all the money it would save me over the years.
So I bought it, and stored it in a place of honor in my fine new garage, and waited for the day when it would save my bacon, or at least $170 from Rescue Rooter.
And of course, that day finally came. The instructions on the drain blaster said to remove the sewer clean-out cap, attach the device to the end of a garden hose, shove everything down the clean out into the main sewer line, and let the "pulsating action" do its work. The first thing I discover is that the sewer cleanout cap is screwed down pretty tight. Fortunately, I own an "Iron Bull", which is a fine adjustable wrench measuring a whopping 24 inches in length. That, I can tell you, makes it one big wrench. In fact, of all the tools that I have accumulated over the years, that wrench gets the most admiring comments of any from visitors to my garage. It's so cool, it's worth it to go buy one and mount it over your fireplace mantle as a little shrine to manliness.
Predictably, the Iron Bull made short work of the stuck clean-out cap. Man, what a difference it makes to have the right tool for the job [English Majors: note the deliberate attempt to combine foreshadowing with irony in that sentence]. I attached the drain blaster to my hose, and jammed it down the cleanout.
Now I know that out there somewhere, someone is reading this with more knowledge of plumbing than me, and they are thinking, "Boy, I sure hope he jammed it down there past where the clean-out feeds into the main pipe. Being an expert plumber and all, if he didn't it, it would just back flow against the blockage located towards the street and then fill up his tub with what we in the business call Black Water, and blow a geyser out of his toilet of what we in the business term 'shit'."
But being an engineer and all (well, a software engineer at least), I had already considered this wrinkle and was careful to push the drain blaster down far enough before unleashing its powerful pulsating action on the blockage.
So after some final and appropriate solemn consideration of the potential consequences, I let things rip. Man, it really did pulsate too. You could hear it, and I swear you could feel it in the ground. I let it thunder for a bit, and then shut it off. I could see the water rise up in the clean-out pipe and then subside. Hey, I think, maybe that means that the drain pipe is flowing again. I decided to give it another blast just to make sure. I let it run for a minute or two to clean out the last flecks of black-water slime from what had to be my now-pristine pipes.
At which point, Mary comes running out of the house waving her arms and yelling, "Shut it off! Shut it off!!".
What's up with that, I wonder?
"It's coming out of the toilet and there's water everywhere! SHUT IT OFF!"
Ah yes, time for that sinking feeling. I felt a case of Full Public Disclosure coming on...
I go inside and see that for once in her life, Mary is not exaggerating. We had a black-water flood on our hands. I ran back out to the garage to get a bucket and a pile of towels, and we started mopping up. We mopped and cleaned and used towels like sponges to fill the bucket. It was hard work, and it was disgusting work. I should know, because it was full of stuff that I had sincerely hoped I would never have to look at again.
Now Mary's favorite part of this whole story is that when I picked up the bucket to take it outside, I discovered that it was apparently full of cracks and holes. All of the mess we had laboriously mopped up was simply draining back out as though the bucket had taken a couple of rounds of #00 buckshot from a shotgun. For a few moments, I could only stare at it in disbelief. Then, with the bucket draining furiously all the way, I ran it out the front door.
And kicked it just as far away as I could. Mary laughed uncontrollably.
I didn't.
What I didn't understand was how the water was getting backwards back into the house. After a bit more detective work, that even included digging up some of the bricks in my walkway, I discovered that during the many remodels involved in going from 1-bed, 1-bath to 2-bed, 1-bath + living room + garage, one of the previous owners had grafted on another section of sewer line. With its own clean-out. Located after the clean-out I was using. So in fact, the pulsating action was going towards the street: it's just that it had one last chance to head back into the house, which it did. With abandon.
I ended up calling a professional carpet cleaning company, Rescue Rooter, and my insurance company. Predictably, the bill was considerably more than the $30 I had spent on the drain blaster. This time, I got Rescue Rooter to shove a video camera down the line so we could see for certain what was causing the blockages. It turned out that tree roots were growing through a broken piece of sewer pipe right at the edge of my property line. That problem was solved by digging up the broken line and replacing it with a new section of pipe that included what the Rescue Rooter guys called a "city clean-out". I learned that a "city clean-out" is a clean-out access point that the city drain cleaners will use to clear blockages that might occur between the edge of your property all the way out to the sewer line buried in the middle of the street. They do it for free, too, so learn from my mistakes.
Robin was so completely sure and positive that this little hose thing was going to do the trick. Absolutely confident and secure. And, since he tends to be fairly MacGyver-like most of the time, I thought all was well. I gazed lovingly at my man with stars of wonder in my eyes.
Once the hose thing was on and plugged in and stuffed down the clean out, we were both so impressed by the pulsating action. Until I went into the house and heard this burbling sound, and ran into the bathroom and saw the flood. Now this was my idea of a great weekend date, mopping up shit with my formerly MacGyver-like man. Who, as all who are reading this well know, can get VERY cranky when this sort of stuff happens, with expletives aplenty to scare the dog.
Therefore, when he picked up the bucket and it gushed all over the floor, I thought I was going to die of hysteria. I sang, most thoughtfully, "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza..."
Robin kicked the bucket across the yard.
Aug 2004 - Powell River, B.C.
It will be worth it in the end.
Wright Cyclone in full song.