Strange Mud, and a Scent of Oranges

ORINDA — The year began for me with two words, spoken with a gasp by my wife. The words were: “Oh, no.” This was about 9 a.m. on New Year’s Day. I was in bed, not quite awake, not quite asleep, still sweeping out the cobwebs of celebration. At that point, I did not feel quite up to domestic calamity. I feigned sleep and listened as she sloshed out the bedroom and down the hall.

Now, indoor sloshing is never a healthy household sound. And so I got up, had a look and let go with a gasp myself. My first words of 1997 were not “oh, no,” but something quite close and, as it turned out, aptly descriptive. The floors of our house were awash in a brown, runny substance. It looked almost like mud.

What had happened, we learned later, was this: The rain had come hard and heavy all night long. It had roared down the hills and streets. It had filled gutters and gullys, washed through street covers and the old clay pipes of the county sewer main, overloading the system. The line that runs down our street began backing up to its lowest point, which happened to be at our house.

Sometime before dawn, the gunk began to splash out of the shower and tub and gurgle from the toilets. It swept across the floors, a customized indoor flood that crested at four inches. And I had slept through it all, dreaming aromatic dreams no doubt of boyhood summers spent on a feedlot. I had gone to bed anticipating a bright new year. I awoke instead to the Month of the Sewer.

*

A Caltech scientist once said something deceptively sage about earthquakes. “We tend to get a lot of them,” she said, “when we tend to get a lot of them.” The same holds true with rain. It seemingly has rained up here all January and with each new storm has come another attack from the county sewer.

The plumbing gurgles. Relief pipes overflow. Toilets rise. So far, the waters--a cheerful euphemism--have not again lapped from the bowls, but it’s been close. My poor 5-year-old has come to regard the toilet as an instrument of terror. At the first gurgle, he screams “run for it” and tears out of the house. Clearly, he saw the trailer for “Twister” too many times.

The county sends out sewer workers, bulky fellows swathed in plastic and rubber. They are terrific talkers, holding forth amiably on everything from the scandal over bogus Kona coffee beans to the likely first-rounders in the next NFL draft. It’s obvious that human contact offers these men a treasured respite from their regimen amid the pipes below. They try to buck our spirits.

“Remember,” one said the other night, “80% of that stuff is just water.”

We were watching a brown geyser shoot from a relief pipe right outside the bedroom window. From there, it would flow under the foundation, raising the small, stinky lake that now lurks beneath the house.

“What about the other 20%?” I asked.

The poor man seemed wounded. This stuff was his life’s work, the canvas on which he paints his plumbing Picassos, and I was behaving like it was just rank old sewage or something.

“Well,” he sniffed, “we’ll send a crew out in the morning to spray.”

Then he recovered his smile and added sweetly:

“We’ll make it smell just like oranges.”

Ed Norton lives.

*

These crews arrive in big trucks, emergency lights flashing. This signals uphill neighbors that another siege is underway at what I imagine they now call “the sewer house.” The nosier ones come to point and stare. I pretend not to notice, standing in pajamas and rubber boots, mop and plunger in hand. What they cannot know is how one’s view of the neighbors is fundamentally altered by getting too good a look at the gunk that runs from their plumbing. Block parties will never be the same.

The sewer teams are followed by claims workers, who unfortunately do not share their colleagues’ chumminess. These act more like IRS auditors, and they are determined to persuade us that boiling water and bleach will salvage all. The sewer pond beneath the house will evaporate, eventually. The sodden shoes will lose their clammy feel. The browned, curled pages of soaked paperbacks can still be read, no?

It’s a tough sell, but I’m not one to whine. This month has brought nonstop images of cars turned into submarines and houses floating like barges in the floods. Of the $1.6 billion in flood damages across California, our loss represents but the puniest of fractions. I also cannot find any great cosmic point to extract from this mess.

No, my only purpose here is to take some revenge on the fates. If my house--the sweet promise of sewer rats aside--is going to smell like anything but oranges for a while, at least I can salvage one measly column out of the ordeal. Now, go boil your newspaper.