By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter
I graduated from high school. I swear. And college. With those fancy tasseled ropes and everything. I bought a house. I’ve read Ayn Rand. I can hold my own in pinochle.
Really.
I put that out there to get whatever mileage from it I can while I still can, because by the end of this, no one is going to believe I can tie my own shoes, much less achieve anything requiring an IQ higher than Shoe Goo.
During the recent stretch of minus 20 degrees, apparently both my house and I suffered a temporary freeze — the house in the plumbing, me in my brain.
I was taking a shower and noticed it was turning into a bath as the water deepened, rather than drained, around my feet.
Uh, oh.
It doesn’t take much impetus for me to launch into homeowner hypochondria, especially since I have an overactive imagination and tend toward a glass-half-empty-and-what’s-left-is-probably-vinegar-anyway mentality. For instance, shortly after moving into my house I woke one night to an unidentifiable sound above me.
“Oh great,” I thought, “a colony of mutant squirrels have evolved the capability to conduct chemistry and have set up an illicit meth lab in my roof.”
This made perfect sense at 4 a.m. after a late night spent scrubbing my old rental place with a fervor driven by the desire to use up, rather than have to pack and move, every cleaning product I had accumulated under the sink. Plus, I couldn’t find my set of measuring cups or the carton of allergy medication I was sure I had packed. So, meth squirrels. I mean, obviously.
Upon inspection the next morning, I found a tree branch tangled in a gutter above my bedroom, apparently blown down during a windstorm. Unless that’s what the squirrels wanted me to think. I never did find those measuring cups or Sudafed.
In my drain situation, given my ability to vault past the obvious explanation to the overly dramatic one, plumbing problem plus cold weather irrefutably equaled freeze-up.
There was just one little detail to the contrary. And by “one” and “little” I mean the mountainous sum of all available evidence.
Anyhoo.
I was sure my house was plugged up by a frozen pipe. Never mind that the water had been flowing and draining just dandy through even colder temperatures for a solid week. Or that the heating system had been working consistently and without interruption. Or that squirming through the crawl space under the house didn’t reveal any pipes that resembled Otter Pops. Or that all the faucets in the house worked just fine, as did all the drains except the tub. Or that the tub drain didn’t even slow to a standstill — it was fine the previous day, then just completely stopped.
Wanting to be conscientious about maintenance issues, though, I wanted to cover my bases. I am a Homeowner, after all, a responsibility I take Seriously. I Mow my Grass. I have Checked my Furnace Filter. I attempt to Not Kill the Plants. I don’t want to be one of those neighbors, with more blocks in the yard than a preschool play zone.
I even Fertilized my Lawn once. And only once, because I noticed it just made the grass grow faster and in more frequent need of a mow, and I’m not one of those neighbors, either.
But still, I wanted to do my due diligence. It might be a hair clog, I figured, albeit a super fast-acting one able to form despite the mesh cover I have over the drain. Perhaps evidence of a resurgence of my mutant roof squirrels.
So I poured half a bottle of Draino in the tub — then the rest of the bottle when that did no good — turned up the heat (for maximum chance of pipe thawing) and closed the door, lest the cat get in there.
I now had a stew of used bath water and Draino studded with floating soap slivers simmering away overnight. Want to know what that smells like? Come on over. The house will probably still smell like it for a week.
The next morning, my bath stew may have reduced a bit to more of a gravy consistency, but hadn’t drained a drop. Next steps were to bail out the water, then throw in the towel and call a plumber.
As I sloshed buckets full of water from the tub into the sink — a mere 3 feet away and draining just fine, thank you very much — I plunged too deep and jostled the toggle for the drain plug — that’s right, I said drain plug — which sent a raft of bubbles gurgling to the surface.
“Oh *glub*,” I thought, as I pulled the plug and watched the water obediently and efficiently chug out of sight.
Drain plug. It never even occurred to me.
As happy as I was with such an easy fix, it’s a sad turn of events when you being a staggering moron is the best possible outcome of a situation.
I imagined what it would have been like had I actually called a plumber. He would have taken one look at the tub, thudded down his toolbox, hitched up his pants, declared, “Well here’s your problem,” reached in to pop out the drain plug, then handed me a bill for $100. Which I would have paid without argument, figuring it a karmic tax on stupidity.
He would laugh about it with his family that night. He would tell it to all his plumber friends. Any future job where the problem was of the customer’s creation — such as clogging the disposal with potato peelings or flushing a cell phone — mine would be the story he would trot out to console them.
“Don’t feel bad, we all make mistakes,” he would say. “You want to hear something really stupid?”
I torture myself with the thought of such embarrassment. It’s bad enough to do something so idiotic. It would be so much worse if other people knew about it. I mean, the horror!
Wait … is this thing on?
I suppose I’ll need to give my diplomas back now. Probably my house title, too. Like my mom would tell me while confiscating every diseased, bedraggled critter I tried to drag home and adopt as a kid, “You’re just not ready for this responsibility.”
I really don’t want to move again, though. Maybe the squirrels can make room for me.
Jenny Neyman is a reporter and editor of the Redoubt Reporter. She can be reached at redoubtreporter@alaska.net.
