“A good plumber is like a good lawyer. You don’t need one until you really need one.”
— David Baldacci
It's been a few days, but in my defense things have been busy.
We're here in Corning after flying back on the 21st, an uneventful two-hop flight through Greenbrier. Dio had decorated the inside of Tara as a surprise to us, and we listened to Christmas music, hung Christmas ornaments, drank wine and ate takeout Thai to celebrate our return.
The hope had been to return for a white Christmas, but alas that didn't happen; wasn't even close in fact, with temperatures in the forties and low fifties for the most part.
Our biggest challenge upon returning here came on Saturday, with the warning of a bubbling toilet on the first floor. Every flush or shower upstairs, every few minutes spent doing dishes in the kitchen, led to a threatening "bloop" from the toilet bowl, and a smell that seemed to be emanating from our old cast iron pipes.
Then Dio summoned us downstairs to assess the growing pool of water on the basement floor that seemed to be coming from a steady trickle along the rusty top of one pipe. Not thinking this through exactly, I called three plumbers hoping to find someone who could help, but when none called back right away I raced to Home Depot to purchase a leak repair kit (two, actually) from a nice old guy in the trademark orange vest who wished me luck as I strode up the aisle, confident we could fix this.
But we couldn't. Dio and I wrapped the old pipe in tape, and the dripping continued unabated. Think this one through with me--why would water be leaking from the top of an old wastewater pipe? Water rarely reaches the top of a wastewater pipe at all; they basically just provide a downhill path for whatever traveled down the drain pipe to reach the sewer. But this one was completely full, and under sufficient pressure that it was leaking from the top.
The actual nature of the emergency became manifest when a flush upstairs led to flooding in a bathroom, and toilet water streaming through the bathroom floor and basement ceiling. It was the day before Christmas Eve. This was a real problem.
Finally a plumber called back to let me know he didn't handle this sort of thing, and to suggest we call Anthony at Falkowski's Sewer Service. Unlike the others, Anthony called back promptly, told me he was at Cornell University unclogging a dorm drain, and wouldn't get to Corning until 9 a.m. the next morning. On the fly, we decided we couldn't hold it that long, and threw together a couple kit bags for a campout at the unfinished condo on Canandaigua Lake.
I'm working on not making things worse by exploding at moments like this; at 59, I've just about mastered simply not saying anything when my grousing just makes everyone around me feel worse. I would've been a better military officer if I'd mastered that one in my 20s.
Anyway, I gritted my teeth, dialed up some Christmas music in the car, and drove in the darkness to the condo. The floors were only installed the day before, and the place was a dusty mess, with the clutter and trash one finds at pretty much any construction site during this stage of incompletion. I worked to assemble a bed frame so P wouldn't sleep on the floor, while Peg and Dio unwrapped the sectional and got the TV working so we could end the evening watching old SNL Christmas skits and drinking wine until way too late. I'd never been there after dark, and was struck by the still beauty of the scene.
The dawn wasn't bad, either.
That morning, Christmas Eve, we availed ourselves of one last shower and one last trip to the john, and raced back down the hill to meet Anthony at Tara by nine.
Anthony is a young, jolly snaker of pipes, at 42 the owner of his own business and making significant coin. He'd given his troops the day off, and had three jobs on the slate for this Sunday Christmas Eve. Ours was, blessedly, the first. He'd been working at Cornell until 2 a.m., so I was pretty amazed at his cheerfulness, setting aside the fact that the job involved mucking around in human waste all day. It sort of reminded me of the line from the old Jimmy Buffett song about the street sweeper:
He said "It's my job to be cleaning up this mess
And that's enough reason to go for me
It's my job to be better than the rest
And that makes the day for me"
Anthony peered into the crawl space in our basement with a flashlight, explained the history of the cast iron pipe system that had likely been there for a century or more. "They didn't have a building code back then," he observed, "so you wouldn't have a t-joint like that one up there that's probably where the blockage is." His job involved sleuthing around the venous system of these old upstate houses, trying to figure out where to send the metal plumber's snake to unplug the drain.
In this case, he isolated the clog in a section of pipe that was inaccessible without cutting a section of PVC, much newer stuff that had been connected to the old iron pipes next to the washing machine. He severed the pipe with a sawsall, noted that no water came flooding down (a sign that the clog was above the incision), lined up a couple buckets, and started jamming the plumber's snake up into the opening with the warning, "Better stand back."
He wasn't kidding. All at once came a torrent of what you can imagine was in a maze of drain pipes that had likely been clogged for several days, flooding into one bucket after another and splashing everything and everyone within a few yards. The smell was miasmically awful.
Finally the flood subsided and he re-sleeved the severed pipe. After satisfying himself that the problem was resolved by flushing the toilets and running the sinks, he moved on to the next job with my check for $600.00 in his pocket. I was effusive in my gratitude for his work saving Christmas here at Tara.
But the story didn't end there. After having a few folks over for Christmas dinner last night, this morning the toilets again began burbling and that aroma started to seep up from the garbage disposal. I'm expecting a crew here in about an hour to try again, and hope we're back up and running before my sister arrives from Texas in a few hours. It would make quite an impression to show her around the beautiful town and this lovely house, only to warn her that she needs to walk down to the 7 Eleven or McDonald's if she has to relieve herself.
And so it goes.
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