'See the little turds all floating around'

Saturday morning of the long weekend, and I am standing in my laundry room with my new best friend Justin. Justin, you see, is the man who was supposed to make all my problems disappear.
What Justin has to say is serious business. I watch as my husband and Justin talk, each nodding their head knowingly about the situation at hand and what we have to do to fix it. I shake my head knowingly, too, pretending to be interested in the conversation. But truth be told, I’m daydreaming about a Girl Guide camp I went to when I was 12 years old. It was there, in our tent, late at night, that I learned something dirty, something so disgusting my mother banned me from repeating it in our house for many years. But here, in my own laundry room, the song danced around my head, like the doo doos that were bobbing up and down on my laundry room floor in a flood of black water.
“Sam. Sam. The laboratory man. Chief inspector of the outhouse can. Toilet paper, toilet paper, paper towels, listen to the rumble of the human bowels.
“Deep down, under the ground, see the little turds all floating around. Sam. Sam. The laboratory man. Scooping up the poopies with his bare, bare hands. Yah!”
Our home, it seems, was experiencing a main line backup. When Justin The Plumber first got to our house that morning, he thought our problem was a minor blockage in the sewer pipe. An hour later, the situation has been upgraded to what my two-year-old son would call an “uh-oh.”
Justin feeds a black-and-white camera down our main line through our “cleanout,” which looks like a portal to another world (it’s really just a hole in our floor) to see what is causing the problem.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says, as he stares at what looked like blobs to me.
(Apparently sometimes you can see rats crawling toward you, so I’m happy I see only blobs.)
As he feeds the camera through our line, he points out one, two, three, four massive tree roots that have grown into our line. The roots, he says, are acting as barriers, so things – food, toilet paper, other non-mentionables that go down the toilet – can’t pass.
“Man, really, I’ve never seen anything like this. Your line also looks deformed!”
Really, truly, I’m so glad my pipes are so screwed up we could be a training academy for apprenticing plumbers, but it has to be pointed out that the, ahem, Number 2s are still doing the backstroke around my laundry room floor.
Now, this is really awful, but I truly want to go up to Justin and gently explain that those little swimmers aren’t mine. I don’t know whose they are – maybe a neighbour’s? a sewer rat’s? – but they aren’t mine.
After much discussion about how we were going to solve this stinky situation, Justin The Plumber recommends he doesn’t clean our main line. He’d pushed through a blockage that was causing the problem but he says our pipe is too fragile and too deformed to be cleaned and the whole thing could crumble – which would cause more of a backup. His advice is to get the whole pipe, tree roots and all, dug out and replaced.
Then Justin The Plumber says something I’ll never forget: “I hate to give good people bad news, but these things can run as high as $8,000, $10,000.”
I think back to my laundry room floor.
Maybe I’ll take a gamble. I did, after all, get hitched in Vegas last year.
“How long will our pipe last if we don’t fix it?” I ask.
Justin The Plumber says our pipe may last a few months.
Or, our very next flush could be our last.
So, what he was saying is: It’s a crapshoot.

[This column appeared today in the Ticket, the magazine I edit that appears every Saturday inside the Kingston Whig-Standard, my day job. Starting this week, I'll post my Whig column here regularly.]