Under African Skies
Week Twenty-five: Under African Skies
This is the story of how we begin to remember
This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein
After the dream of falling and calling your name out
These are the roots of rhythm
And the roots of rhythm remain
--Paul Simon, Under African Skies, from Graceland
In the past few weeks I have been reading some autobiographical “stories” by Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. I say “stories” but the truth is what I read was not fact or fiction. The ‘stories” were more of recollections that I imagine were reconfigured to make them more interesting than they might have been if they weren’t. I suspect that my own memory does something similar.
At about age 12 or 13 the responsibility to empty the majority of the contents of the septic tank fell to me. Having assisted or watched my brother since I was able to lift the heavy steel pipes we used to redirect the sludge, when the job became solely mine, I was more than familiar with every aspect of it, including the fierce odor that somehow became more familiar than disgusting. There was simply no way to avoid the full face reunion when the lid to the tank was opened. The blanket of richly sweet stench would envelop my head as if it would pull me face first into the black below. I imagined cartoon arms of smoke immediately reaching out from the slightest break in the seal as I would lift the lid, reaching and spinning and wrapping around my head coaxing me, inviting me to not resist. I can remember turning my head as if turning my head might help me not smell what could not be not smelled. It seems funny now. It never did then.
Although I always did, I never had to wait to be told it was time to empty the tank. Living where we did, using well water and a homemade septic system, it wasn’t hard to tell when things weren’t right. The job almost always started with the search for the two impossibly heavy pipe wrenches that weren’t where they were supposed to be after the last time I emptied the tank. Because I knew approximately where I would need them I could throw them, one at a time of course, out onto the lawn. Next came the task of lifting and positioning two really long steel pipes. Moving them was not as much a feat of strength as it was balance. Lifting either end of either pipe was fairly easy, but walking slowly toward the middle of the pipe moving hand over hand was the only way to find the near middle so that the entire pipe could be lifted and carried. Like a Flying Wallenda I would inch my way toward the tank such that one end of the first pipe was near enough to receive the right angle pipe extending from the pump. The process was repeated for the second steel pipe with the exception of where it was placed.
Their placement was not random, unlike my mystifying lack of attention to this detail. The first pipe, so to speak, had a set of threads, and the second had a coupling. Easy as the birds and the bees, thus the need for the pipe wrenches. If as was sometimes the case the pipes were not arranged in order to attach them to each other my penance came in the form of moving the pipes until they were. Attaching two very long steel pipes seems like an easier thing than it ever proved to be. Moving them nearly into position was infinitely easier than moving them slightly until the threads could be spun together, and once the two pipes became one ridiculously long one, moving them at all was insanely hard, which is why positioning the first one was the single most important part of the job. I cannot remember how long it took me to realize this, but I remember well how hard that lesson was and how often that lesson was taught.
The electric submersible pump was attached to the end of an eight foot steel 2-inch pipe that had an additional shorter piece attached to the end creating a right angle, which could be inserted into the end of the two very long steel pipes lying in wait across the lawn. Perhaps the worst part of my monthly ordeal was lowering the heavy pump into the tank. There seemed no better way than to position the pump upright and straddle the 15 inch opening causing me to look directly into the crap below. The smokey cartoon arms would twist around me in ever smaller circular wraps until my head turned away sharply while the muscles of my neck and shoulder and arms and back strained as the pump pulled the pipe sliding through my hands until it found the bottom, and on the best days the short right angle piece of the extension was turned away from the top of my head. On the worst it was not.
I never questioned my father’s decision to pour raw sewage onto the very ground on which we lived. I don’t know that I ever questioned anything he did or said when I was that age, but the indignity of the task seemed below my station in life. In other words, I hated it. I hated those heavy, heavy pipes. I hated the pump that sometimes hated me back. I hated those pipe wrenches that seemed to work better for my father than they ever did for me. But most of all I hated standing over the tank. The black of the full tank was inches below my feet, and the bottom of the empty tank was far enough away to scare me. Different from falling in, I imagined being in. I sometimes thought about the ground above the tank caving in, taking me with it, but most always about not being able to get out. There was no way not to imagine it. I could feel the cold black. I could see the tiny opening above me receding as I slipped under.
Getting away from the top of the tank was always my first priority. Less important for me was making sure the coupling between the pipes was tight enough to avoid the nasty spray of black that would coat the wrenches that I had carelessly left nearby. Less important was wearing rubber boots which would have meant that my shoes didn’t carry the constant reminder of my indignation. Less important was using any amount of care while uncoupling the system and putting anything rightly where it belonged.
Just recently while walking near where we live, my wife made a comment about the stench that had reached her nose. She wondered what could possibly smell like that. I didn’t.
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