Rural Life in the UP of Michigan Some stories about life on 160 rural acres in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

Most of us don’t give much thought to our machines, what they do for us, and how much we depend on them; myself included. If they just do their jobs and don’t fail, we assume they are a force of nature; a predictable resource always there to serve us. That is, we don’t think about our machines until they fail.

Hoo Boy, did we have a machine fail us the other day. This one is fairly simple… a pipe that goes through the wall of our basement, and then underground to a 1,000 gallon concrete septic tank. Just a pipe that delivers some gross contents from the pristine environment of our home to the big underground tank, and from there to a drain field. The outside part of this system is all underground, out of sight, silently and capably doing its job. We garden and cut the grass over it, and don’t give it a second thought.

When the toilet refused to flush, and plunging only caused terrible sludge to percolate out of the shower drain, we knew we had an issue. I brought a 5 gallon pail and big channel lock pliers into the basement to remove the threaded plug on the 4” sewer pipe. After several turns of the wrench, the plug loosened, and water started to pour out from between the threads and (mostly) into the pail. When the pail filled up, I closed the plug and emptied the contents into the basement sump, which was still working. After several trips with the pail from the clean out to the sump, I got a little braver with the plug. Yes, the liquid did fill the pail faster if I loosened the plug just a bit more. But, I learned there are limits.

On my 5th or 6th trip, the plug was loosened enough that it came out in my hand. One hand held the plug, the other held the bucket, while a 4” stream of sewage shot out at me. A second or two went by until I collected my wits, dropped the (now useless) pail, and, while ignoring the fact that I was being showered by pressurized sewage, I worked to get the plug back into the pipe. I’m grateful to report it went in, threaded correctly the first time, and after several more seconds, I stemmed the flow of sewage onto me, the floor, and much of the rest of the contents of the basement.

The upside was that most of the rest of the pipe was now empty, and it only took a few more trips to the basement sump to finish emptying the pipe. I could then take out the plug and look down the sewer pipe. There was still water in there, but it wasn’t enough to shoot all over the place (progress!). I own a small plumber’s snake, which I located in my workshop, and deployed into the clean out. It went out its entire length without having any effect on the situation. I made several more attempts with this tool with the same results. Next I called my neighbor and good friend to see if I could borrow his much larger snake. By now it was late in the day, and he agreed to let me pick it up the next morning.

I had a bit of a dilemma. Everything that was on my body when I got my sewage bath was now polluted. The solution to the pollution was the washing machine, but the dirty water output from that machine had no where to go. A shower would have been nice, but where would the water go? I put my work jacket out in the entryway, changed my clothes and stacked the dirty ones where they’d do no harm, took a sponge bath, and called it a day.

In the morning, my jacket in the entryway had frozen. My pickup (fortunately) started and I made the trip to my neighbor’s place to pick up the snake. After several more hours with the snake, I determined that what I was doing was not fixing the problem. Since I had installed and have maintained this sewer system over the years, I wanted to do my best to fix the issue, but I reluctantly came to the conclusion that this problem was beyond my capabilities. So I called my friends at the plumbing shop in town, and, bless their hearts for all eternity, they sent an expert out in less than 2 hours. He and I worked at digging out and opening the inspection plug of the septic tank, using his handy probe camera to see what we could see, and then deploying his industrial strength plumber’s snake with a cutting end the likes of which you’ve only seen in medieval torture museums.

It took several passes of the snake and many trips for an observer to go through the snow to the septic tank to watch the snake emerge with (hopefully) a gush of liquid. After a lot of work, things started to flow again. And it was determined that a chunk of the sewer pipe had sagged over the years, which likely contributed to the clog. Now one more project has been added to next summer’s chores… digging up that pipe and correcting the sag.

Events like this one are good for making one think about how dependent we are on the equipment all around us. The failure of this fundamental system had consequences far beyond the system itself. And once one shuts down, the tools needed to fix it become extremely important. If the necessary tools also fail, the problem can magnify and can quickly get out of control. The fact that we live in the north where winter temperatures can routinely dip below zero makes one realize that certain failures could be life threatening. The main lesson I learned from all this is, tools and friends can have huge importance in times of trouble. Both tools and friends need to be maintained in case they might be needed in an emergency. On the friend side of the equation, being a good friend who is willing to help out when others are in need can pay you back with interest if you find yourself in a crisis.