Lane and his wife had purchased the old farmhouse several years earlier. They had lived in it since then, but now the toilets and sinks were starting to back up. Lane wondered if the lines were plugged.
He decided the first thing to do was to check out the septic tank and see if he could find any problem from that end. He asked the previous owner where it was.
“It’s somewhere in the back lawn,” the old man said. “I can’t remember quite where.”
With that knowledge, Lane started digging a trench across the lawn. He dug from one side to the other with no luck. He dug a trench crosswise the first one but still had no luck.
As the lawn became more torn up, Lane began to feel he would never find the tank. His five-year-old son had come out to watch Lane dig. He asked, “Daddy, what are you digging for—treasure?”
Lane smiled. “I think all I am digging is my own grave.”
He went in to get some water, and that’s when he realized the septic pipes ran through the basement and were relatively low. The tank would have to be lower still.
He dug the second of the trenches deeper but didn’t find anything, so he started back on the first trench. When he got close to where he had started his digging in the beginning, he heard a clink. Digging around it, he thought he had hit a rock. But as he dug deeper, he realized it was a corner of the tank. It was right where he had first started digging.
He looked at his lawn, which appeared as crisscrossing canals. He would still have a lawn if he had only dug deeper when he’d started.
It took him some time to get the top of the tank cleared off. When it was finally done, he got a big steel bar to lift the lid. He stuck the end of the bar under the edge of the lid and put the bar across a cinder block to get some leverage. He then pushed down hard. The lid didn’t budge.
He got a big hammer and brought it down hard on the end of the bar. The lid still didn’t budge, but the block broke, and the bar whacked him in the shin. Lane started dancing around in pain.
“You’re so funny,” his little son said.
Lane got the tractor and brought over a large rock. He was sure it would hold up. He put a chain around it and used the tractor bucket to lower it into the hole. He set the bar across the rock, then used the big hammer to pound the end of it. The rock flaked off pieces, but it held up to the pounding. Gradually, the lid inched its way up and finally popped open.
Lane used the chain and bucket of the tractor to lift the lid out of the hole. When he looked inside the septic tank, he saw it was a solid mass. He knew that must be why the pipes were backing up.
Lane called a pumper truck. However, in the late 1960s, the mechanical means of cleaning a tank were limited. The truck came, and the truck operator looked into the hole.
“Wow!” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It will have to be broken up before I can get any of that out.”
Lane took the steel bar and slammed it onto the mass, but it hardly dented it at all.
“What do you think is the best way to break it up?” Lane asked the truck operator.
The man scowled and spoke facetiously. “Dynamite would be my guess.”
The man told Lane to call him back when he got things loosened up. As the truck pulled away, Lane thought about what the man had said. He smiled. Dynamite was a good idea, and he knew just where to get some.
(To be continued.)
The post The Septic Tank first appeared on Meridian Magazine.