The Lower Depths: Deconstructing My Plumbing

"No man can be judged happy until he is dead."  -  Solon the Wise

This cautionary ethical adage, instilling as it does the virtues of prudence, patience, humility and taking the long view, is the wellspring (if you'll pardon the expression) of my theory of plumbing. Aristotle demurred, on the grounds that happiness is not a state, but rather the active exercise of the virtues. My namesake on the other hand, with admirable perspicuity maintains that there's something to it. In this I am not an Aristotelean. It is, in a word, the whole matter, the kernel, the meat, the essence of plumbing. I have touched on this before.

If you give me an ordinary bicycle, let's say, I can probably fix it. I can usually figure out my way around it and, with a little trial-and-error and a modicum of profanity, I can put it right. It's quite simple, really. My technique is simply to buy the latest issue of Bicycling Magazine . . .

,

. . . riffle past all the articles about Lance's doping charges, go straight to the "Gear & Bike" section, and proceed to buy every tool the magazine recommends I own. So, for example, just to give you some limited idea, I now own the Crank Brothers multi-tool 19 ($33) . . . 

. . . Pedro's torque wrench ($140) . . . 

. . . the Giustaforza torque wrench ($185, just to be on the safe side) . . .

. . . the Lezyne Carbon 5 minitool ($80, also just to be safe) . . .

. . .  the Gimp Emergency multi/hanger tool ($40) . . .

. . . Pedro's Trixie ($30) . . .

. . . and a penis necktie for the post-ride pub crawl (priceless).

(More than just a) phallic symbol

Having assembled all my tools about me on the front terrace, my workplace resembles a shipyard.

In mere moments I can take an ordinary bicycle, disassemble it so that all the parts are laid out and visible, like this (always more parts than you expect there might be) . . .

. . . reassemble it, discard any "extra" parts, and Bob's your uncle. 

E pluribus Elliptigo.

But when confronted with a breech in the household plumbing, as I have been of late, no matter how simple on the face of it, I quail. Memories of past attempts haunt me. Investigating something as obvious as a leaky faucet, I encounter in the lower depths what seems (at first) easy enough, if always somehow inaccessible and usually something I've already fixed at least twice before . . . 

Investigating further, the system begins to branch out a bit, fractillate (if I may coin a word) beneath the house. The exact pipe I had located further up towards daylight seems to be deliberately sequestered by its compeers from discovery in the subterranean murk . . .

Following the tangled mass of iron onwards, I emerge into a neighboring back lot, where the system begins to build unaccountably into some hellish Escher puzzle based on exponentiality, the Simpson Paradox and Godel's Theorem . . . 

At last, having crawled on bloodied hands and knees for several miles, I encounter the source of the problem in a neighboring city . . .

There, with prayers and burnt offerings, I loosen the offending joint, valve, fitting, nut, or whatever is the source of the leak, putty it, tape it with plumber's tape, replace whatever needs to be replaced (after 27 returns to the hardware store and the plumbing supply), tighten it with bloodied knuckles and whatever remains of my vital force, and return to my home a shattered man. I hasten to the neighboring city several times during the night to ascertain that my repair is so far holding, the pipes are sound, the leak is dry, the water pressure normal. 

Thereafter on subsequent nights I lie half awake in a troubled doze, imagining that molecules of water are massing once again behind my shoddy work and my pathetic teflon plumber's tape, and having failed by main force to burst their bonds are insidiously attempting to undermine me, never sleeping, filing up silently behind the lead molecule to follow it through the microscopic breech that will open behind its escape, the whole mass of water tumbling through the tiniest issue in the valve, submerging me in my feverish plumbing dream.

Hence, after Solon, my compleat theory of plumbing - that no leak is ever finally repaired until a man is dead.

Home Improvement: If It Isn't One Thing . . .

He that owns a house (to paraphrase Dr. Bacon) hath given a hostage to fortune. Or (to put it differently), it's always something; if it isn't one thing it's another; if something can go wrong it will. And so on. (Funny how the inevitable brings out the instinct for tautology in us: "if it isn't one thing it's another." Well of course, what else could it be? and what does that tell you in any case?) In this case, it all started before our holiday in Mexico last December. The hydrant in the front yard, the bloody Woodford Model Y34 without which the West would never have been won, was found leaking for the thirtieth time.

Unfortunately, only the top third or so of this same item is visible above ground. It connects directly to the water main, a vile and precarious-looking length of crumbling galvanized pipe installed deep in the pre-Cambrian layer, a paradigm of inevitability stretching about 40 yards from the street and entering the (basement-less) house at some indiscernible point beneath a layer of bricks, dirt, fossils, dog bones, prehistoric middens and the assorted detritus of forgotten civilizations. This is a time when the prudent homeowner seeks the services of a teenager or a paroled criminal to excavate the point of the difficulty by main force.

"Sod off?"

None of this is to speak ill of ditch diggers, arguably the font and wellspring of human civilization (even though they can be unreliable sources of heady conversation). When the Mesopotamians needed a ditch to be dug, they called out the ditch diggers.

So this heavy-caliber piece of plumbing had been lying about the front yard for several months now, while the botanical features, always carefully tended, slowly languished in an incessant spring wind and were badly in need of regular watering. In times of prosperity, of course, my preferred tactic would have been to find a plumber, go fishing, pay him for his services, and be done with it. These being leaner times, however, there was nothing for it except to arm myself with assorted pipe wrenches, crescent wrenches, hammers and mallet, channel lock, penetrating oil, plumber's tape - all laid out on the picnic table like a surgeon's accoutrements - and go at the thing hammer and tongs, finally reducing it to this:

I lack a deep understanding of how things work; I am promptly confused by basic spatial relationships, and hence diagrams and exploded schematics will not dock neatly in my brain. To disassemble a thing is merely, on my view, to enter a wilderness like a knight-errant whose weapons fall from his nerveless hands and all is confusion to his lusterless eye. Nevertheless, as the prescribed repair kit contained only five pieces (one of which was a washer), I felt my chance for error considerably reduced and, $50 and two additional trips to the plumbing supply later, the hydrant was reinstalled with the assistance of my friend and neighbor, Larry, who undertakes the technically complex projects on this ranch in exchange for the occasional meal.

But I cannot rid myself of the gnawing feeling that it's always something. In my dreams I have seen the ancient pipe slowly and noiselessly rusting beneath the ground, finally bursting like an old man's artery and turning this place into a veritable oasis on the High Plains. And, as my dream fades, I see a nightmarish scene, and hear a lone voice in the night:

"This is gonna cost ya, buddy."