To Snake a Drain

Or, How To Spend A Delightful Friday Evening;
Or - Worse Yet - "My Kingdom For a Mongoose!"

It all started when I washed my hands.

Friday afternoon. I'd returned from my walk in the woods, plus some grocery shopping. I was in my bathroom, a relatively tiny box tucked next to my office, in the lower level of my quad home.

As I rinsed, I heard my drain make that choking sound that told me it was filling up. This isn't unusual. I have one of those innovative "flexible" drains, a rubbery ribbed tube that replaces the usual assortment of straight pipes and P traps and elbow bends and giant nuts and random stuff that normally populate the cramped space under a bathroom sink (1). The price you pay for this flexibility is that the drain will sometimes get sluggish. All you need to do is reach under the sink and squeeze the thing, which breaks up any clog it might contain.

Squeeze I did. I thought it had worked, but no. The drain filled completely, and no amount of squeezing caused the water to -- well, to drain. That's why it's called that.

On to the plunger, which proves to be a pretty useless contraption for a lavatory sink, because you can never plug up the drain overflow (2) sufficiently to pressurize the pipe while plunging. We tried that.

Oh, yes, we. By this time I had summoned my wife, who made a few customary, pithy and well-deserved comments about the state of my bathroom. I had tried the plunger already, but it's difficult to plunge and hold in place a washcloth stuffed into the overflow hole at the same time. Plumbers can do this, either because they have far better equipment or because they have extra arms they carry in their toolbox and snap on when nobody's looking.

Now, before my wife joined me in this endeavor, I had already tried putting so much "squeeze pressure" on the flexible drain that it had popped off the wall pipe and spewed yucky water all over the inside of the cabinet -- which, in my usual habit of ignorant overconfidence, I had left crammed full of assorted cleaners I keep under the sink (3). Fat lot of good these would do, as they were now covered in the kind of filth they say they can eliminate in the twinkle of an eye.

The flex pipe was off. But, genius that I am, I reattached it and continued to ply it much more carefully, in that vain homeowner's hope that with just one more squeeze, the miracle would occur, the water would whoosh down the drain, and this corner of civilization would be saved.

Of course all that additional squeezing didn't work. But since I'd emptied the pipe once, why not do it again? I knew how to disconnect it, and this time would be different. This time the sludge would stay in the wall pipe. Which it did. Mostly. However, additional sludge leaked from that pipe in a lovely stream onto the floor of the cabinet. 

I clutched one end of the flex pipe in each hand. This is when you realize you have the proverbial wolf by the ears -- you can neither hold it, nor safely let it go (4). I backed out of the cabinet, keeping each end level with the other, so water in the "U" wouldn't pour out. Problem. I needed a third hand. But I found that if I turned carefully and nudged open the door to the walk-in shower, I could pour the drain contents onto the shower floor. After all, the really yucky stuff had already been cleared out of this section.

It's lovely when theory meets facts.

What I left on the shower floor would be the stuff of more nightmares.

Return now to my wife. All of this stupid stuff I'd performed before my wife tried to help me out of being stupid. I told her none of this. Men instinctively know we should do this: your wife already knows you're an idiot, so why lower your IQ even more in her eyes? (For the record, I've been married long enough that my IQ is a negative number.)

I persisted, alternately reattaching the flex drain, pouring in water, squeezing, noting progress. This went on for longer than sensible. "Look!" I'd say to myself: "The water level's dropped a centimeter!"

To myself, because by now my wife was long gone. She knew this was Man's Work -- that is to say, something only a silly man will pursue even unto the detriment of his soul (5). She had more important things to do, like knit some wool pants for one of the grandtwins. Something useful. She was content to know that I'd not be getting into any other kind of mischief, and that the disaster would be contained to "my" sliver of the house.

Of course, nothing worked. Time for the Snake. For the uninitiated, a plumber's snake is a long flexible steel cable with a bulb made of coiled steel on its business end. The cable, or snake's body, is contained in a cylinder that comes in various sizes, depending on the length of snake you purchase. The cylinder sports a crank handle. You feed the snake into the pipe slowly, turning the handle clockwise as you navigate around bends in the plumbing. Emphasize: Slow-ly. Eventually, you'll encounter what is euphemistically called "the obstruction," and you'll either bust it up or retrieve it.

I used to have one of these snakes. Mine was a 25-foot cable housed in a red cylinder about a foot across. I went looking for it. It's not an easy thing to lose. My problem was, I had no idea where I'd left it. And I had a sinking feeling that using a plumbing snake was kind of like giving birth: each time you go through the experience, it's so painful you blot it from memory.

But I'm getting ahead of my story. It's enough to say that I didn't know what I'd done with it, leading my wife to remark, "You know, you throw away a lot of things, so it's not surprising." Ah, joy. Trouble was, I had a sinking feeling she was right. Only "throw" was probably not the right word. "Hurl" seemed more appropriate. It might have landed, somewhere, by now. It's been years.

Off to the hardware store I traipsed, after reading up on and comparing devices that ranged all the way from a glorified small parts grabber up to things that will spin the entire contents of your house, with power source so bulky you have to notify the Grid when you start it. In other words, sizes that range from a mealworm to an anaconda.

Now, I'm mostly Italian. There are several kinds of Italians, ranging from massive to diminutive. I'm on the smaller end of the scale. This means that I'm not well equipped to handle some of the larger tools. I'm just as likely to be spun by a hammer drill than to spin it into concrete. I chose a smaller snake, a 25-footer with a 1/4 inch cable, for those of you who need to know these things. Of course it was a manual one -- no drill-powered one for me, for the spin reason just mentioned.

The trip to the local hardware store permitted me to have my "male victim" conversation, raging over everything from Why couldn’t I see this coming and Why did this have to ruin my Friday and Why Why Why Why Why?

Home again, toddler whining over, I first took some time to relax (it was Friday, after all, and the drain wasn't going anywhere), before setting to.

I don't know how plumbers do it. I don't. How do they manage to contort themselves, all day, every day? I think if you peel off their standard uniform (6) you’d find they’re really octopuses, or some other creature that can squeeze into places smaller than it is (7). My wife loses no opportunity to comment on my ever-increasing lack of flexibility, but I can still find my way into some tight spaces. It's finding my way out that's the problem. (Come to think of it, this is actually  the story of my life, and probably yours, too.)

Having emptied the cabinet base of all the cleaning bottles, I unleashed the snake. Now, the instructions call for keeping towels and buckets handy. That advice might have been useful before the flex drain had sprayed its contents in every direction. (See above, if your memory's as bad as mine.) I had towels on hand, but as for a bucket, why bother? How could things get any worse?

This, as you all know, is what every guy says before he starts doing that which will result in Things Getting Much Worse.

The instructions (such as they were, in microprint on a tiny card that came with the snake and told you to go online before you harmed yourself) also call for patience. This I remembered from my last snaking experience.

This is what happens. You feed the cable into the drainpipe, and it will go, oh, say six inches or so and then stop. You've hit your first ninety degree turn in the pipe. In an older home, these kinks have been placed at myriad random intervals by sadistic installers (reincarnated demons, really), who then bury them behind walls or even under concrete, there to bedevil (pun intended) any homeowner unwise enough to think that snaking a pipe will be an Easy Thing (8).

This first jolt is therefore never the blockage, it's the bend. You can tell, because from behind the wall you hear a clanking sound. I've read enough "one star" reviews to know that at this point you must rotate the cable clockwise, so the bulb on the snake head can find its way past the turn. The "one star" people don't know this, or they haven't done RTFM (9). They force the cable, and it kinks, and then your snake is as useful as any snake with a broken spine is. They don't last long in nature, and they're not going to last long in your plumbing, either.

The farther you snake, the more sinister the clanking sounds get. I'm reminded of the scene from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where the Fellowship are deep in the Mines of Moria, and Pippin is stupid enough to drop a rock down a well. The resulting clanking awakens orcs (10) and other nasty creatures of the deep, which results in mayhem. What was I awakening in the depths of my own house? There are stranger things under floorboards and in basements than are dreamt of in a homeowner's philosophy.

I had another problem. Because I'd removed the flex drain, I couldn't run water from the sink to determine if the blockage was cleared (and to drown whatever life forms were now slithering towards me, bent on revenge). I'd have to trust my judgment, and by now you know how good that is.

This is also the point when you wonder just how much cable you've burned up on this little excursion. You're experiencing the snaker's worry -- FOROOC, or Fear Of Running Out Of Cable. FOROOC means you think you really should have bought the bigger one, the Anaconda, instead of the Garter snake you're using.

Finally, you hit that weird firm but squishy something that is either the clog or some soggy animal that just happened to crawl in the pipe when you were away at the hardware store, fall into the antediluvian depths, and drown. The snake has now impaled whatever this is. Heartened, you begin to tug on the cable. (Why you'd want to drag this thing closer to you is one of the mysteries of the human condition.)

Ahem. Not so fast, grasshopper. You have to coil the snake counterclockwise as you retract it. Otherwise, Bad Things Will Happen. Now, the right way to do this is to know how many times you turned the cable clockwise as you snaked, along with how many coils of the snake you uncoiled from the drum, as well as Pi times the diameter, reduced by twice a quarter inch for each revolution, divided by two times the days until the next full moon, or something like that. In other words, you are completely clueless as to how many counterclockwise turns to make. You resort -- as I, sometime Catholic, now did -- to prayer (11).

Oh, those wise snake designers. Learning as they did from every screaming homeowner. They now wrap some red stuff around the cable at a spot they label the One Foot Mark. This is a warning as dire as that which bars entry to Chernobyl. You are now one foot away from freeing your snake's head.

Prithee, pretend a moment, you are this Garter snake. You've been sent down a pipe of unknown length and sinuosity, and every fraction of an inch of your slow journey downward, you've accreted slime and nastiness along your entire body. Your head, such as it once was, is now crammed full of the kind of material that would make Stephen King run wailing into the gloom. At last, you have encountered the Thing. And now you are dragging this Thing back out to freedom. Slowly, so slowly, the cruel master clasping your tail is helping you. Maddeningly, this master keeps stopping, wiping the freed parts of you off, rotating you a bit, and otherwise feeding your immense and growing impatience.

What will you do, dear Garter, when your head finally clears that horrible prison, your jaws stuffed to bursting, full of this noxious, poisonous Thing?

Yep.

Ever step on a snake's tail? I did, as a kid. (Don't ask why or how.) In half a second, the snake's head whipped about in at least three dimensions.

When my Garter cleared the pipe, I understood why goggles were part of the instructions. Why wearing the oldest clothes you owned should have been part of the instructions. Why innocent passersby should be kept at bay with yellow caution tape -- better yet, with that funky radioactive sign. Why a flamethrower might be a handy accessory. Why notifying the EPA could be a regulatory requirement.

This was Schrodinger's snake head -- everywhere and nowhere at once. Its trajectory confounded me. Like a bulldog, it shook the Thing from its jaws, spraying black Thing guts and painting everything -- cabinet, floor, bottom of sink, and hapless homeowner -- with indescribable slop. It was a veritable explosion of snaky rapture, as it expressed -- in gesture much louder than words: "Free at last, free at last! Thank God almighty, I am free at last!" (12)

I finally grasped the mad Garter's head, reacting as a snake charmer might when seeing his cobra experience an hallucinogenic fit: "The head! Go for the head! A mongoose! A mongoose! My kingdom for a mongoose!"

From the snake's jaws I pried the remains of the Thing -- surely a denizen of Dante's ninth circle of Hell -- whence it hit the cabinet floor with a stomach-turning SPLORP!

The rest, as they say, is silence.

Drain reattached. Cleanup done. Towels and clothing deposited in the washing machine with an apology to it for its above-and-beyond service (13). I ran the hot water for the entire weekend. No way would the Thing's relatives see the light of day. I flushed all the remnants clear into the next county. I'll settle the water bill later.

Ah, plumbing. Such joy.

How was your Friday night?

ASSORTED AMUSEMENTS KNOWN AS FOOTNOTES

(1) And, if you've ever needed to make repairs, you've discovered that there are more shapes and sizes to the tubes, fittings, doomajabbitzes and what-have-yous that comprise a typical older home's plumbing arrangement, than Imelda Marcos used to have shoes; but, unlike her closet, none of the fittings ever seem to match each other, much less what's in the store.

(2) For those of you who've never had a sink fill to overflow, that's the hole about 6 inches above the sink. It's there so that if you plug your drain and start running water into your sink, and then have some kind of lapse (senior moment, toddler eruption in the next room, dog falling down the stairs), your neglected sink's rising water will spill over through this hole and down the drain. Guess when it doesn't work. Right.

(3) I should mention that this cabinet is really a hollow box that rests directly on the cement slab, so at least there wasn't additional damage being done to a false cabinet floor. That happened in my kitchen, and when I tore that beauty out, I encountered cave-dwelling life forms. Homes. Sources of terror, really.

(4) Jefferson said this, but he was talking about slavery. Which, come to think of it, homeownership kind of is.

(5) If for no other reason, the language that accompanies a task like this.

(6) Usually jeans and some kind of plaid shirt, but cartoons often depict these guys wearing that denim overalls thing that looks cute on toddlers, but that's about the only time. I sometimes wish they'd go back to them, or at least understand that when they're working under your sink, an extra-long shirt goes a long way toward eliminating views most alarming to the rest of us.

(7) Watch some videos, for gosh sakes. You can't believe what these things can do. Octopuses, I mean, not plumbers. Well, plumbers can do some amazing things, too. Like charge you $50 to just nod at your toilet.

(8) This is another annoying thing about plumbers. They either magically know where those kinks are in your system, or they sprinkle magic dust on the end of their snake, so that it effortlessly navigates your system.

(9) Read The F**cking Manual.

(10) Orcs are nasty critters, which have a linguistic birth in Old English, were adopted by Tolkien as the personification of evil things, and have since spread like an invasive species through all sorts of (mostly) less imaginative fantasy efforts. Pippin's a hobbit, and the Mines of Moria are -- oh, never mind.

(11) In business, we call this an estimate.

(12) Oh, come on, now. Dr. King.

(13) The last time I apologized to it like this was when I emptied the diaper pail into it. Yes, it was that long ago. And yes, we did use cloth diapers. And yes, those contents do qualify as toxic waste.