What’s worse than reading a blog about some guy’s septic system? How about being the world’s most boring man: The guy who decided that writing about his septic system would make for compelling blog-reading?

I’m not after pity. It’s too late for that now. The time to show me pity (and not for being boring) was back in May when I decided the leach-field  pipes of my septic system needed a good back-flushing.

“Backbreaking” and “frustrating” are only two of the “ing” words that come to mind as I recall the effort involved in finding, and digging down to, the deeply buried ends of those pipes so the guy with the high-pressure jetting machine could get to them.

I had no backhoe, not even one of those cutesy little mini critters. I had a pick-ax and a spade with a taped handle. And after the pick-ax handle broke, I had only a taped-handle spade.

The digging wasn’t even the worse part. The real headache was trying to figure out where to dig. Unlike more modern leach-fields, mine had no vent pipes poking up from the ground to indicate the placement of the five drain pipes that stretch across the yard.

It was pure guesswork, but the really, really annoying part of the job was knowing that, had I waited a month, finding those pipe-ends would have been a breeze. Most every summer, especially the very dry and hot ones, the subsurface pipes’ locations are broadcast in ugly fashion because the grass above them dies. The yard becomes scarred with five brown stripes, a situation caused by too little soil atop the gravel that surrounds the pipes. The gravel drains away most of the rainfall needed by the unfortunate lawn above.

Those tell-tale runways were nowhere to be found in May. I spent hours trying to see signs of them. I used

Sucking The Life Right Out of the Lawn

polarized sunglasses. I squinted. I looked down from the elevation of the rear deck. I tried looking askance and cross-eyed as you do with those  stereogram images. I studied dew patterns and even tried putting my ear to the ground after somebody drained the bathtub.

After many near-misses, and several weeks of lawn-mangling labor that included a half-dozen wrongly-situated holes, I managed to find all the ends. The lines were jetted and eventually my sore back recuperated.

Now, of course, Mr. Magoo could easily find where to plant his shovel. Give my lawn a dose of the weather it has seen recently –  a few days of blazing sun with no rain – and those hidden underground pipe routes become as easy to find as somebody, out here in the sticks of Warren County, wearing a John Deere cap.