The Next Village

–Assume a water molecule.

–Where am I?

-Some AirBNB in central New York. 

-What time is it?

–3:45 AM.

–Can I take a piss, O Socrates? 

-Of course.

-Can I get a drink?

-What can you do with a quart of water molecules?

-Drink, wash, flush the toilet, put out fires.

-Where does a water molecule enter a mobile home park?

-If the park has city water, at the main pit.  If the park is on wells, at the pump house.  

–What then?

–It goes to the individual lots.

-Do you know where the pipes are, underground?

-Not as well as I should. 

-Can you fix a leak in a pipe if you don’t know where it is?

-No, and fuck you.

-How do you measure water loss?

-Gallons, cubic feet, CCFs, dollars.

-Where does the molecule come into the park?

-I already told you.

–Where does it go after that?

-To the homes.

-Pick a home.

-Ronnie McCallum?  The nurse who lives at five Oneida?

–Go on.

-It comes into her home.  She drinks it and excretes it.

–You can do better than that.

-OK.  She has just come back from a twelve-hour shift.  Her feet ache and she is covered with a film of sweat.  She jumps into the shower.  The molecule washes over her body as she is soaping her hair, armpits, breasts and aching feet.  She thinks that she could really use a foot massage and a man who pays his own bills.  She is careful to pull the shower curtain tight to block the view of Junior Gydesen, the sixty-year-old man with the invalid wife who lives next door, who asks about her love life and peeps through her windows.  After the molecule has completed its journey, it flows into the drain.

–Go on.

-I think you enjoy this.

–What colors does water come in?

-Drinking, gray, black.  Drinking water is the stuff before it has touched a body.  Gray water is water you have washed with.  Black water is what goes down the toilet.

-Where does it go, after it goes down the drain?

-A three-inch white PVC pipe sticks out from under the diaper of each home and runs into the ground.  From there, it runs through a baffle into the septic tank.

-What is a diaper?

-The landscape cloth that supports the insulation underneath the home, in the crawl-space between the pad and the bottom of the home.

-What is a baffle?

-A ‘T’ in the line where the input flows into the tank.

–What purpose does it serve?

-Fuck if I know.

–What can clog a baffle?

-A non-exclusive list would include tampons, baby wipes, cat litter, grease, paper towels, plastic trolls, corks, bottle caps, toy cars and toy action-figures.  The biggest problem is baby wipes.  Everybody uses baby wipes and nobody admits it.

–What about chemo meds?

-They interfere later in the process, in the leach-beds.

–What happens after the baffle?

-Sewage sorts itself into three layers, i.e. scum, liquids and sludge.

–Go on.

-Sludge never leaves the tank, so it has to be pumped periodically.  The guy I bought my park in central New York from could praise his septic pumper’s honesty and work ethic all day long.  I thought, He pumps shit for a living!  What is he going to steal?  Will he get into his own stash?

–What if there is a clog in the lines?

-There should be clean-outs between the tank and the homes.  Those are four-inch PVC pipes that peek above the ground.  They look like periscopes.

–What do the clean-outs do?

-They let you get a snake into the lines without digging them up.  We should call them the Silent Service.

–How’s that?

-The submarine branch of the Navy is called the Silent Service.  The park is studded with periscopes.  Maybe – the Septic Service?

-How much of the park is underground?

-More than half.

-What happens after the tank?

-Effluent –

–Stuff that flows out.

-Effluent liquid flows out into perforated pipes that go into a leach bed.  Bacteria eat the organic matter.  The water is absorbed into the ground.  Then, it evaporates, goes into aquifers, or goes to the sea.

–Is it a closed system?

-If you include the last step, yes.  Otherwise, no.

–Is it like anything you have seen on The Street?

-It is not unlike a complex trade.  The squares on the diagram are tanks and leach beds, instead of legal entities. The pipes are cash flows.  Contractual rights take the place of water pressure and gravity.  You seem strangely quiet, Socrates.  Could you get me a hot bath and a hooker?

–That is above my pay-grade.

************************

Early this week, I got a call from Dee Dee, the manager of my park in central New York.  She said that the people at thirty Digamma couldn’t flush their toilets.  The pipes that fed the tank for that home had settled.  Since they weren’t pitched right, they were not emptying into the tank.  The pipes, which were made of thin-walled PVC, had sprung a leak and the tank had filled up with ground water.  Dee Dee called the septic pumper.  He pumped the tank and put in a temporary fix that allows homes connected to that tank to use their toilets until new pipes are put in.  I called a guy who could excavate and replace the pipes.

Each tank in that park services two homes and empties into its own leach field.  Everything is gravity-fed and the soil has a high perc rate.  It is a simple system that usually works.  But, like grain on a marble threshing floor, everything eventually breaks down.

I visited the park yesterday morning.  I saw that the pump guy’s temporary solution was an open three-by-three-by-three hole in the ground just before the inlet to the tank.  Sewage empties into the hole.  Whatever doesn’t seep into the ground flows into the inlet to the septic tank.  Inside the hole was a lot of what you would expect, plus a bunch of baby wipes.

Fucken baby wipes.

One of the homes that feeds that tank is a double-wide that used to belong to a guy I call James Wilk.  That home has been empty since he moved out.  The other home belongs to a young couple with three young children.  When I saw the baby wipes, I walked over to their door and knocked.  A baby screamed.  The mother came to the door.  I said, ‘Can I show you something?’

-What is it?

-You’ll need to put on some shoes.

We walked the twenty feet between her porch to the hole.  I said that I did not think we had met before.  She said that we had met once.  I said that we rarely spoke because she was one of the good ones.  When we got to the hole, I pointed and said, ‘You see that?  Those are baby wipes.’

-We never use baby wipes.  My youngest is four years old.

-Well, they are not mushrooms.  They didn’t sprout and grow in place.

-The people in the other trailer must have flushed them!

-Nobody lives there.

-We don’t use baby wipes.

-Please be sure you keep it that way.

Anthropologists in New Guinea say that it is difficult to find cannibals.  When people are asked if they eat long pig, they say, ‘We never do that, but the people in the next village do’.  When the researchers ask the people in the next village whether they eat human flesh, they are told, ‘Of course not!  What do you think we are?  But the people in the next village, well, they are little better than animals’.  When the western Allies occupied western Germany after the Second World War, it was impossible to find any men of fighting age who had fought against the Americans.  Everyone had fought on the eastern front.  And nobody had been a Nazi.  All of the Nazis were in the next town.  And if you asked the people in that town if they were Nazis, they would say that they had remained out of politics during the Nazizieit, had sympathized with the Allied cause and had, even, helped out the resistance movement.  But there was a large Nazi contingent in the next town.  Those people, you know, are not like you and me.  It is the same in a mobile home park.  Everyone and no one uses baby wipes.  And when you find someone who does, it is the guy who lives next door.  It is never the person standing in front of you, inserting a baby wipe into the toilet and pushing the flush lever.