Smoo B launched into a short, reckless version of Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising,” though neither of us remembered many of the words. B recalled “The chickens are sleepin’ in the willow trees / The cow’s in water up past her knees,” and I dug up “The rails done washed out north of town / We gotta head for higher ground,” but mostly we just threaded out a lonesome jam, the end of which was met by an audience that had once again doubled in size. Although we had fumbled the tune badly we still received generous applause, and there were smiles everywhere when B, while retuning, said with a grin, “Could be that one needs a little work. Well, any requests?”
After a pause, a homeless man who appeared to be in his early forties spoke up. “How about Springsteen’s ‘The River’?”
“Can you help us out with those lyrics?” I asked.
“Sure can try,” the guy smiled back. B launched into the tune, and the man sang the sad ballad with genuine feeling, never missing a word. I choked up a little as I tried to nail the harp solo coming out of the final verse, which, given both the singer and the situation, was heartbreaking and poignant: “Now those memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse / Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”
When we three finished the tune, congratulations were offered all around, and the crowd of more than a dozen people now seemed to have grown more comfortable with an experience that was as unusual for them as it was for us. An older woman, who referred to us kindly as “boys,” offered us a heel of bread that she had wrapped in a tattered, green bandana; a man, grasping a brown paper bag, explained that he had traded a little day labor for vodka and that we were welcome to pull from it if we liked. Thanking them for their generosity we asked again if there were any requests. A white-bearded older man, who appeared to be in his late seventies, laughed a loud, raspy laugh that revealed how few teeth he had remaining. “Let’s have some hobo songs!”
The request was so gracefully ironic and well-timed, and was delivered with such enthusiasm and good humor, that everyone laughed together in a bonding moment that slung a bridge across a broad river of class, opportunity, and life experience.
“Well, sir, we can handle that one,” I replied, returning the man’s smile with my own.
“How about a Woody Guthrie set?” Smoo B offered. There was general agreement on the plan, and we began the most memorable string of songs I’ve ever had the pleasure to play. I no longer recall all the tunes that set contained, but we hit “Hard Travelin’” and “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,” “Vigilante Man” and “Do Re Mi,” “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore” and “Pretty Boy Floyd the Outlaw,” which includes the following immortal lines:
As through this world I’ve wandered,
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
The folks in the audience thanked us after each song, asked if we were sure we didn’t mind playing just one more, offered us bites and swigs of what meager food and drink they possessed. They tapped their feet, clapped their hands, sang along when they knew the words, and greeted the last note of each tune with grateful applause.
We played on toward dusk. Smoo B’s fingertips were turning to hamburger from playing so hard for so long, and my lower lip had begun to bleed from ripping notes on the harp. Now dark began to fall in earnest, and B proposed that he and I each choose one song to conclude the spontaneous musical event that our audience had already begun to refer to as a “concert.”
For his finale, Smoo B chose the playfully upbeat “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” the ultimate celebration of a hobo’s imagined paradise:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers’ trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I’m bound to go
Where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall
The winds don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
We all finished the song laughing together, no doubt wishing as we laughed that the pastoral fantasyland of the Big Rock Candy Mountains might yet be a real possibility for us.
Now the time had come for me to choose the closing tune. In that moment of falling darkness I named the melancholy “Hobo’s Lullaby,” and through the taste of blood laid down the sweetest, most languid harp notes I think I’ve ever produced. I had no way of knowing at the time that this would, many years later, be the tune with which I would sing my baby daughters to sleep.
Now don’t you worry about tomorrow
Let tomorrow come and go
Tonight you’re in a nice warm boxcar
Safe from all that wind and snow.
So go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Can’t you feel the steel rails hummin’
That’s the hobo’s lullaby.
When the trailing notes of this last lullaby had lilted and riffled down the Truckee, and we had all returned from the world that only music can build to the stark reality of the homeless encampments along the darkening riverside, our audience not only applauded but now gave us a standing ovation. There were more offerings of the food and drink that were so precious to them. One lady said it was the best afternoon she had experienced in years. A younger woman invited us to come back any time, adding with a sweet smile that “We don’t get too many concerts down here.” And then, in what was the most touching moment of this strange and wonderful experience, a man in tattered, greasy clothes offered us what I suspect was the greatest gift he had to give. He asked, with a note of genuine concern in his voice, if we had a safe place to sleep, adding that he knew a secret spot where we could be sheltered from both weather and harm. “I don’t tell anybody about it,” he whispered, “but after what you did for us here it seems right to offer.”
I MIGHT AS WELL come right out and admit it: I lost my septic tank. The tank is twelve feet long, five feet wide, and five feet high. But that didn’t stop me from losing it.
I suspect you’ve never heard of John Mouras, but you owe him a greater debt of gratitude than you might imagine. In the 1860s, Mouras, a Frenchman, designed the first functional septic tank, thus introducing a simple, highly effective technology that would, by century’s end, come into wide use and profoundly improve the lives of people around the globe. Before Mouras’s tank, human waste was often dumped out of windows from chamber pots and drained away through open gutters. But even when waste was gathered into hand-dug cesspits, it still contaminated groundwater, spread disease, and smelled horrible. The writer H. L. Mencken reportedly claimed that Baltimore in the 1880s reeked “like a billion polecats.” Even in the twenty-first century, people have been killed by drowning or asphyxiation in collapsed cesspits. One moment you’re mowing the lawn; the next, you’ve been sucked into a sixteen-foot-deep subterranean chamber dug by some long-gone person who needed a place to put their poop. I’m keen to avoid an inglorious end in which I leave this fine world in an archaic fecal storage chamber.
Fortunately, John Mouras’s invention changed all that, and it is to his credit that the septic tanks we use today don’t differ appreciably from his prototype. Waste is delivered through pipes into the two-chambered tank. In the first chamber, solids settle and are anaerobically digested by bacteria, a process that radically reduces their volume. Liquid then flows into the second chamber, where further settling occurs. The resulting, second-stage liquid, now relatively clear, is safely returned to the soil through a network of perforated pipes laid out below ground in a large area called a leach field. That’s the simple, elegant system in a nutshell. It isn’t ro
cket science, but it works. And it certainly beats the smell of a billion polecats, not to mention offering the handy side benefit of making it unlikely that you’ll contract hepatitis, typhoid, or cholera.
If, like most Americans, you live in a city, it may be unclear to you why I’m singing the praises of an underground human-waste–digesting tank. Please understand that for those of us dwelling out here in the sticks, the septic tank remains the only feasible alternative to the chamber pot or cesspit. In fact, about a quarter of American households still depend on the lowly septic tank, whose glory has unfortunately remained unsung. Lest you urbanites begin to feel superior, remember that—to crib from the title of a children’s book Hannah and Caroline loved when they were little —Everyone Poops. Your poop, like mine, is removed from a toilet through a pipe that takes it away. But where is “away”? Although you don’t tend to think about it when you flush, an impressively complex network of pipes delivers your feces to a distant wastewater treatment facility. In fact, there is an entire profession devoted to dealing with your poop. You’re thinking “Wastewater Treatment Engineering,” aren’t you? That does sound comfortingly antiseptic and professional. Try again. Fecal Sludge Management.
I’ve evangelized about the miracle of the septic tank and reminded you that your magically vanishing poop doesn’t go “away” but is instead shunted through an elaborate arterial system of conduits that eventually deposits it where it becomes the focus of some other guy’s day job. (Your sewer bill doesn’t seem so unreasonable at this moment, does it?) But my real point is that when you live as remotely as we do, there simply is no “away” to which things may be thrown or flushed. We are alone and largely self-contained up here on Ranting Hill. Everything we need must be brought in, while everything we want to dispose of must be hauled out. This self-sufficiency extends to our own feces. Rather than going “away,” our waste simply makes a short journey from our bathroom to a nearby underground tank, where it must occasionally be dealt with by our family’s designated Fecal Sludge Manager.
Unfortunately, I am not a very adept Fecal Sludge Manager, and that is how I came to lose the damned septic tank. You see, the tank must be pumped out about every four years (for some reason I tend to think of it around the time of presidential elections), because septic sludge overflowing the tank into the leach field is environmentally harmful, and it is my responsibility to prevent that mishap. Step one, then, is to dig up the tank and expose its twin lids (which resemble manhole covers) in preparation for pump out. Because I keep meticulous files on every aspect of our modest little Ranting Hill kingdom, I began by fetching the folder labelled “Septic Tank,” which I felt certain would identify the precise location of the underground poop reservoir. When I opened the file folder I instead discovered only the following three notes, scrawled in my handwriting by the idiot who had dug up the tank four years ago:
“Tank hard to locate. Major ass pain.”
“Great Basin Tectonic Event IPA is DA BOMB. Get another growler!”
“Write about this someday. Angle: odor of shit. Shit and memory. Remembrance of Things Past. Like Proust with his madeleine. Only shit.”
These barely intelligible ravings gave me absolutely no sense of where to dig. However, I thought I had a decent memory of the tank’s location, and so I began to excavate with shovel and mattock. It was necessary to dig by hand rather than using our tractor, because the septic tank is plastic, and one accidental strike with the teeth of the backhoe’s bucket would crack it, leading to a very messy, stinky, and expensive replacement project. While the tank is immense and should be a breeze to find, the problem here was one of depth as well as location. Because we dwell atop a steep hill, anytime we need a flat spot we must create it by hauling in fill dirt and leveling it to construct a terrace for whatever we hope won’t blow, roll, or slide off into the sagebrush below. In this case, we had decided three years ago that the girls needed a trampoline. To create a flat spot for this ridiculously large toy, I had hauled in a lot of fill, which meant that in addition to not knowing where the tank was, I had also lost track of how deep it might now be buried.
Well, I dug a hole. And then another, and a third, a fourth, and, eventually, a fifth. Then, on the theory that I simply wasn’t digging down far enough, I enlarged and deepened the holes, one after another. At this point I had gone three feet deep, when a septic tank would normally rest only a foot or so beneath grade. Five monster holes, each with an immense pile of shoveled dirt heaped next to it, and no sign yet of the tank. My back was about to give out, I was frustrated that my notes had been useless, and I also had some choice words for the trampoline. (And, yes, I did say these things out loud to the trampoline, as if it could be dressed down by my blue-streaking profanity.) At dusk I threw in the towel, put up my tools, and headed for a cold beer—a beer that, much like the excremental sludge in my missing septic tank, had been created by a process of fermentation.
“How did it go out there?” Eryn asked, as I reached into the fridge.
“Well, if I keel over with a coronary from all this digging,” I answered, “you’ll have five pre-dug holes ready to go. Bury me in whichever you like.”
“Five holes? I thought you were just digging up the septic tank,” she said, innocently. There followed a long, awkward pause.
“I can’t find it,” I confessed.
“Isn’t it pretty big, like the size of a car?”
“Yes, dear, it is,” I answered.
“Well, Bubba,” Eryn finally said with a shrug, “shit happens.”
In her brilliantly titled book The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, the humorist Erma Bombeck advised that we should all “Laugh now, cry later.” Under normal circumstances this is precisely the kind of wisdom I endorse. But another great humorist, Will Rogers, observed that “Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.” And it was Uncle Will’s insight that seemed to apply here, as I just couldn’t manage to laugh at my own absurd predicament. For the next few days, every time I used the toilet I imagined what was flushed racing through unseen pipes to “away,” some yet undiscovered location where it would plunge into a 1,500-gallon slop bath of urine and feces. How could a guy lose something like that?
The next day I used the tractor to drag the trampoline about twenty-five feet away, and I then began to hand-dig beneath where it had stood. I dug four big holes that day and three more the day after that. By the fourth day, there was more hole than ground in the vicinity I was working, and so many perfectly symmetrical piles of excavated dirt that it looked as if the place had been infested by a scurry of man-sized ground squirrels. Or, perhaps, as if a band of pirates had come and gone seeking buried treasure—albeit pirates whose treasure map consisted of nothing more than a nearly illegible note remarking enthusiastically on the excellent flavor of Tectonic IPA.
As I stood surveying the damage I had wrought, and wondering what I should do next, Caroline came outside to bounce on the trampoline. “Whoa, Dad, look at all those holes. That’s epic! What are you making?” she asked.
“Nothing, honey. I’m trying to find a buried treasure called the septic tank,” I said.
“Which hole is it in?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I replied. “Which hole do you think it’s in?”
“Hmm. Which one did you dig first?” she asked. I surveyed the dozen holes and pointed to the one I had excavated at the start of my misadventure. “OK, that’s the one,” Caroline said with absolute confidence. “You know how you always say I gotta trust myself? Something in your dad brain told you to dig there. Maybe you just gave up too easy. I bet it’s right under your nose!”
Caroline’s advice, though unscientific, wasn’t any less rational than the haphazard strategy I had pursued on my own, and it was considerably more thoughtful than any of the notes in my own folder on the subject. So, as she stood watching, I clambered down
and resumed digging in hole number one in search of a tank full of number two. Within five minutes, my shovel struck with a hollow thud I had not heard in four years. I tossed the tool out of the hole, bent over quickly, and began desperately scratching at the soil with my gloved hands, like a coyote pawing the desert sand for water. Eureka! I beheld a telltale swatch of emerald-green, high-density polyethylene plastic that was the tip of the fecal iceberg I had worked so hard to find. After thanking Caroline for her help, I dug on with the fervor of a jackrabbit, and in less than two hours I had fully exposed both lids of the tank in preparation for the pump out.
The next afternoon, a large truck rolled up to Ranting Hill to make my family’s excrement go “away.” Technically called a “fecal sludge vacuum tanker,” this specialized truck is, for a reason that is as obvious as it is ironic, casually referred to as “The Honeywagon.” With a capacity of nearly 15,000 gallons, it can transport the contents of a dozen septic tanks at once, and it is usually driven by a burly young guy named Jimmy, who, despite what he does for a living, is inexplicably cheerful. On this day, however, I was surprised when a short, gray-haired, older woman threw open the door and climbed down from the cab of the truck.
“Mike, right?” she said, shooting her small hand forward for a shake. “Jimmy’s laid up with his back again, so I’m makin’ his runs today. I’m Sue, his mom. Let’s get this party started!” With that she gazed out over my field of holes, in the center of which sat the exposed lids of the tank.
“Tell you what, Sue,” I offered, “I’ll pop those covers for you if you don’t tell Jimmy about my treasure hunt. You just say I hope his back mends soon.”
“Deal!” she said, with the same cheerfulness I was accustomed to in her son. She stood nearby and watched me crawl into the hole and begin to unscrew the tank lids that, for a just a moment longer, would continue to separate the pure desert air from the accumulated vapors of a presidential election cycle’s worth of gases produced by decomposing human waste.
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