On my own

The little door to enter the crawlspace under our house is tiny – perhaps 18 inches square. Every time I have to go under our house, I swear I never want to do this again.

The plastic that has been laid in the crawlspace to keep the humidity down rustles as I crawl on my hands and knees over it. It’s dirty and opaque, and in the worst parts of my brain I imagine snakes slithering under it, keeping warm as the temperature drops outside.

I have never seen a snake under this house, but my brain knows they are there.

It’s seven thirty in the morning, and it’s 46 degrees outside, and I am crawling under my house with a flashlight in my mouth trying really hard to not think about snakes because both of the toilets in our house backed up yesterday evening and I’m afraid I shall have to replace a section of drainage pipe. I cannot remember what size drainage pipe we have from the last time I had to replace a section.

Most houses have 4-inch drainage pipe – and as it turns out, we do as well. But our house is seventy-five years old, and was built at a time when all the standards were not yet written in stone. You cannot take such things for granted with such a house as this one. Like the Holy Spirit, it goes where it chooses.  

At some point in the sordid history of this house, a jack legged renovation in the en-suite bath led to chunks of mortar and concrete ending up in the drain pipes, and shortly after we bought the house, I had to crawl under the house and cut out a huge section of the 4 inch cast iron pipe and replace it with PVC because the chunks of concrete had wedged themselves in there.

I assumed instantly that since they were both clogged, this must be a piece of the concrete we had missed, come back to haunt us.

The last time this happened, I tried plunging it, and tried pouring Drano down the tub drain, and I even took the toilet out and tried running a plumbing snake down the drainage pipe. That last adventure is how I discovered the chunks of concrete. It was then that I surrendered and called Dad.

My father was one of those men who could solve any problem. He could fix your air conditioner, rebuild your engine, or rewire your breaker panel. And for 48 years of my life, whenever I had a problem I could not solve, I called him for help.

I explained the situation to him, and said I didn’t know what to do.

He asked two questions. “Does the other toilet work?”

I said that it did.

“The one that is clogged – is it closer to the road or further from the road than the one that works?” was the second question.

“The clogged one is furthest away from the road”, I told him.

“Then it’s simple”, he said. “You have a blockage – probably some chunks of that concrete – between the clogged toilet and the wye where the other toilet joins the drainage pipe. You need to go under the house and cut out the clogged pipe and replace it.”

Oh. That’s all.

He heard the uncertainty in my voice, and walked me through what I needed to buy, the procedures of how to do it, and all of that. And that afternoon, I did it, saving myself probably $800 in the process.

But it had been five years since my Dad died, quickly and unexpectedly, one of the more than 15,000 Mississippians who died of COVID during the pandemic. In fact, it had been five years ago yesterday.

Five years since I could ask him for help. Five years since I had a backup plan. Five years since I could hear him on the other end of the phone and know that my worries were over.

For the last five years, I’ve just been on my own.

It turns out that I didn’t have to replace any pipe this time.  It wasn’t a piece of concrete, just a pernicious clog. In an attempt to avoid crawling under the house again, I decided to try snaking it from the cleanout in the front yard. This approach had hit me at 3 in the morning, when I remembered Dad’s two questions, and realized that if both toilets were clogged, the clog must be after the wye where the two branches join, and thus really close to the cleanout at the front of the house.

Twenty minutes later all the pipes were running freely, and the disaster was averted and I had spent no money at all. And literally my first thought when I saw the toilets flush successfully was that I wish Dad could know about this. That he could know I figured it out. That he knew I was OK. That I didn’t need a backup plan.

I wish he knew I could make it on my own.