This is what greets my neighbors on their morning walks and the Amazon delivery guy as he trots to the door on a daily basis. No, it’s not a shallow grave – for the record, my wife is fine (as evidenced by the visitations of the aforementioned Amazon delivery guy), and I haven’t put an end to the family dog a la Kristi Noem.
Actually, there was a leak in the basement a few weeks ago. The main water line coming up out of the concrete floor was spraying its payload all over the furnace. I’m no plumber, but this seemed like a bad thing.
“Is it kind of a bluish pipe?” the friendly woman on the phone asked when I described the situation in my storeroom.
“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, not liking the fact that this stranger already seemed to know something sinister about my house.
Someone would be out as soon as they could. I covered the hemorrhage with a heavy glass bowl to divert the water away from the furnace and into a nearby floor drain while I awaited the actual plumber.
“Yep, that’s poly-B, alright,” he confirmed as the two of us squatted over the few inches of pipe jutting from the floor. Short for polybutylene. In the mid-seventies they anointed it ‘the water pipe of the future.’ It was suppose to revolutionize the plumbing industry. Inexpensive and indestructible (or so they thought), it was used in new construction until the mid-nineties. Until they realized it wasn’t quite the miracle pipe they took it to be. Once they discovered that fluoride (used in 73 percent of community water supplies in this country) degrades it.
The best-laid plans…
“And this isn’t the city’s problem?”
“Fraid not. From the city connection to the house is your responsibility.” Of course.
And the news only got better. “There’s no fixing it – you just have to replace it.” Of course. And that would require a full shutoff and jackhammers and trenchers and boring machines and buckets filled with water standing at the ready in the bathrooms should anyone be unable to hold their water for the duration.
And the best part was, we had an out of town guest arriving THE NEXT DAY to spend a week with us. Of course. So all this talk of boring into the basement and manually filling toilet tanks to keep the loos flushing was threatening the structural integrity of my skull. Therefore a provisional plan was quickly formulated. Tony, the plumber, leapt into action, fashioning a temporary patch that, providing the crick didn’t rise in the interim, would get us through the week. The heavy equipment was scheduled to arrive the following Monday. Which would also give me time to either hit the lottery or take out a second mortgage by way of financing.
Besides the fact I still have running water in the house, now that the dust has settled that mound of dirt out front is all I have to show at this point. We’re waiting for it to settle. They said to give it a month or so. If it was closer to Halloween I’d put a tombstone next to it.
[On a side note – not to get too Stephen King-ish, but if I were to bury someone in a shallow grave, the front yard might be the perfect spot, as counter-intuitive as that may seem. Whereas common sense would dictate hiding it in some out of the way location, in the past two weeks not one of my neighbors (or the Amazon delivery guy) has stopped by to ask what’s going on, or sent the gendarmes to investigate. Just something to file away for future reference.]
As for the money, well, que sera, sera. Before eviscerating the budget on thirty feet of buried pipe, there was talk of traveling across the pond this summer to visit the UK and see if I could find any kin walking the streets of Glasgow. Instead, I’ll be watching soil compact.
The best laid plans…