TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

2/17/04 – Water Pipes and Tight Spaces (Or, What You Do for Family)

Dusty is the word most commonly used to describe what I am doing now. The air is cut with flashlight beams and dust motes make them solid shapes in the dark. I wanted to bring a camera to capture it but somehow couldn?t bring myself. After pushing from one side of the house and to the other, we have to dig out a section of dirt to allow access under a sewer pipe.

At first, the experience is exciting. You enter through a small hole in the guest bedroom, no wider than your shoulders. It was much larger when I was smaller. You drop right onto the dirt and meet your first obstacle, getting down. Reminds me a little of those tunnel scenes in ?The Great Escape?. Once down there, you?re forced to stay down doing a low-crawl that would earn you points in an army live-fire exercise. No elbows and knees, it?s forearms and toes for you, chum. The space is thankfully free of vermin and spiders.

After about an hour or two, the little things get to you. The closeness, the dust in the air that means you?ll be sneezing grey snot for about a week, the little clods of dirt and gravel that dig into your arms, legs, back, chest and head. It?s exhausting work, shoving pipes, tools and lights ahead of you as you belly-crawl. If you didn?t know you were claustrophobic before, you know it now. You have to stop sometimes, gasping for breath like a fish out of water. You can run for miles, why is this so taxing?

Lying on your stomach, you feel like someone?s been punching it after a while. Lying on your back, your head finds every single piece of gravel left over from when the foundation was poured over 40 years ago. Holding your head up is tiring after a while and you lie back down only to find the gravel again. Makes you nutty after a while; your body is under pipes, under a house, on hard ground and you can?t move too easily. Dust and dirt gets into your eyes and stays for days on end. The odor of raw sewage seeps through the pipes and you hope the wet spot on the ground is just water.

Finally, dad calls a halt to the work ? we?re not getting anywhere. Pipes that need to bend aren?t, other pipes that should thread don?t. Trips back and forth to the hardware store to get pipes re-tapped; I come within two inches of taking a wing mirror off of a Lexus SUV but don?t ? dump luck prevails. I come out with a fine coating of dust, and tears in my clothes. We take turns sweeping each other off with an old broom, raising more dust than a windstorm in Oklahoma. We?re happy to be out but it?s tainted with the knowledge that we?ll be back in there again before long.

So why am I here? Just because that's what you do when you're family. No, spouting that kind of sappy adage doesn't make it any easier to digest, either. It doesn't change the fact that my parents are without hot water and my dad is working on a problem that he doesn't know how to solve and running into all kinds of roadblocks that a pro just sidesteps by instinct. I can't leave him to it, can't leave my mom to it, either. So, yes, I'll throw on some old clothes that get torn up and work for hours on it after completing a full days work. Not fun, not right but necessary to serve the needs of a system that was looking after me long before I understood it. That raises all kinds of interesting inconveniences, like being in a crawlspace, or sodding a lawn that just gets torn up 6 months later by a team of large dogs. Or that time I spent several days going over a floor with a nailbar looking for particle board tacks. Or the times I've painted, hammered and sawed to help out.

Sometimes its fun, cool and a life experience to be remembered. Other times, it's just a plain slog through the mud. I remember the good parts better than the bad, which is good. Now that I'm back into slog-mode, I'm remembering everything that got me here and about how many times I've been here before. So, that part's bad; the good part is-once it's done, it is a never-ending source of pride and accomplishment to know that I helped make things better. There are those happy moments of looking at a sawdust-and-paint smelling room and saying "Wow, look what I did." Or sitting on top of a roof, looking out and sipping on a hot cup of coffee. Or getting that picture of me and Winnie when she was a pup while sanding the skylight. Flipping the lights on my room after it was carpeted and painted. These are all treasured memories now, I'm sure this one will be too, someday.