When I heard didgeridoos, and people saying “G’day, mate,” I realized I’d dug deep enough but in the wrong place.
There is a clogged drain at my house. I suspect that the big sycamore tree, which consumes about a week of my life each year, is to blame.
I love the tree, with its huge trunk and vast canopy of leaves that provide shade in the summer and a day’s worth of cleanup in the autumn. But it does drop little branches all over the place and the leaves that find the garage gutter soon decompose and make a hospitable environment for any seeds that might float by, resulting in the lushest elevated greenery since the hanging gardens of Babylon. So, after the leaves and twigs are picked up each autumn, the pressure washer is dragged out and the gutter muck is blown away. After the first year, I learned to move the car first.
It is also apparently a needy tree. I have given it little attention this summer. It has let this be known.
When I was putting in the garden this year, something that achieved notice is that if one digs more than a few inches into the ground around here one finds a fiendish combination of stones and clay. My idea had been to dig deeper than usual in hope of producing good, rich, fertile soil a couple of feet deep. I gave up — the time is past when one can pop into the hardware store and purchase dynamite.
That which I cannot easily do, though, the sycamore has no problem accomplishing. Its numerous roots have no problem navigating the rocks and the clay. They now seem to have found the basement drain.
Actually, “basement” is a bit of an overstatement. It is below grade on one side of the house but not on the other. I shall be confused if ever I have to hide from a tornado. In what I call the basement is a utility room, and in the middle of the utility room, which is also the laundry room, there is a drain. The washing machine empties into a big slop sink which in turn empties into this drain, and normally all is well.
All is not well, though, when the sycamore tree demands attention by blocking that drain. Then a load of laundry results in the only indoor pool in my part of the county.
This happened recently. The water did no damage that I can find and did gradually drain away, and further laundry since then has involved siphoning the washwater out the window and onto the yard. It’s nicely rustic, but winter is coming.
My large and robust steel flatsnake was effective in locating, but not removing, the clog. I marked the point on the snake where it hit the drain, then stretched it out the door and measured how far down the drain the blockage was located — 20 feet, plus or minus a few inches — and drove to town to get a drain declogger which attaches to an electric drill. The new drain-clearing device was a twisted mass of broken spring five minutes after my return.
There was no alternative but to dig.
This would have been a job for the Gravely, if there were a Gravely backhoe attachment and if I had one. I don’t, so it was just me and a pick mattock, with a shovel to transfer the loosened rocks and clay to the wheelbarrow.
Finding a plastic pipe underground isn’t all that easy. I thought I sighted carefully the direction the drain took. Apparently I was in error. It would be nice to have a map of the maze of pipes under that part of the property, but I don’t have one of those, either. So an afternoon’s digging produced a lot of rocks and some clay, some roots, the cable that goes to the aeration pump, and vivid reminders that I’m getting older. But no pipe.
So the hole needs to get bigger, go to one side or the other. My enthusiasm for this is tempered by the knowledge that there’s a 50-percent chance that I’m digging in the wrong direction. That fact is moderated by another one: now it has me mad.
I’m not entirely certain what I’ll do when I find the pipe. Perhaps the damage will be obvious and will suggest a solution. But the way this project is going, I’m not so sure. And at this point I’m finding myself doubting that the pipe exists at all; maybe the water from the washing machine traveled under the slab to a place where it entered some other dimension, the portal now closed.
But I dig on, deeper and wider, downward, ever downward, through a rich vein of gold, and a coal seam that must be four feet thick, past the uranium, in search of my goal: a four-inch white polyvinyl chloride pipe.
Perhaps I’ll never find it. Perhaps a neighbor will notice the buzzards and come and stare down into the hole. In which case, the dirt’s in the wheelbarrow and the shovel is next to it.
And the sycamore can be my monument.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.