Mobile home park infrastructure is like an iceberg; what you see is only the tip. Most of it is hidden underground. For example – as you walk through a mobile home park, every fifty yards or so you will see capped four-inch white PVC pipes extending vertically about a foot above ground. Those are clean-outs. They hook into septic pipes that lead from individual homes and feed septic tanks. They allow the manager to insert a snake into the lines to de-gunk it when people flush baby wipes, tampons, cat litter, plastic toys, grease or thick paper towels down the toilet. They look like periscopes from submarines that travel underneath the ground, instead of under water.
Of course, a ship that traveled underground would be a ‘subterraine’, not a submarine. And nothing is below the Marines. They eat crayons.
I have often said that the manufactured housing world is upside down. But, to be fair, that is no less true than the rest of the world. For example – try these on for size:
‘Ineffable means’ “not available for sexual relations”;
Let’s pone the meeting;
This food is gusting! Give me some more!
Your hair is a mess. Get sheveled.
All of my workers are gruntled.
I would never have dated myself when I was younger – but I did give myself a few hand-jobs.
This morning, the phone rang. I knew that it could not be good news because it was Dee Dee, the manager at my park in central New York. She is very low maintenance, and she usually communicates by text or email. So, when she calls, I know that it is serious. I said,
-Happy birthday.
-Thank you! I have had so many…
-Not as many as me. Is that putz Allan gone yet?
Allan is the old maintenance guy. I fired him at the end of March for – well, everything. He had a pitbull with a neck as thick as my waist. He didn’t answer his phone or respond to texts or emails. He plowed half the park roads and then quit. He trashed the skid steer. He stole a lawn mower. When I fired him, I gave him to the first of May to move out. Today is the twenty-fifth, and he is still there. The sheriff says we cannot raust him as a trespasser, so we have begun accelerated eviction proceedings. They will work, but they take time and they are not self-executing.
-Jason says Allan has found a place and will be gone by the thirty-first.
Jason is a new resident, who lives in a park-owned home near Dee Dee. I said,
-If I had known that Jason is Allan’s cousin, I would not have rented to him.
-Kayla’s mother is Sunny’s mother’s sister.
Kayla is Jason’s WOG. Sunny is Allan’s WOG.
-So that means –
-Allan is dating Jason’s aunt.
-What’s up? Why did you call?
-Sam’s Rooter is in the park. There is an issue at D-32.
-Oi.
Sam is a local guy who snakes drains. He is competent, professional, reasonable and responsive. I asked Dee Dee what was going on and she told me to call Sam. So I did. He told me that the baffle leading into the tank was clogged. He recommended that we install a clean-out over the baffle.[1] That way, next time the baffle becomes clogged, we can open the top and clean it out with a stick. He excavated the dirt above the baffle, and instructed the maintenance guy (the new maintenance guy – I would not trust Allan to do this) on how to install the clean-out. With luck, I will not have to call Sam again.
The drinking-water analog to the clean-out is the curb stop. A curb stop is an underground valve that shuts off underground water mains. You can install them at junctures that cut off water to one or more homes or sections of the park. They are convenient to have because they allow you to turn off the water to a separate section of the park when you need to work on the pipes. As a best practice, there should be a curb-stop in front of every home.
Many parks do not have enough curb stops. Sometimes curb stops break. When that happens, you either live with it (if it broke in the open position), or you dig it up and replace it. That is the joy of owning an older park with infrastructure cobbed together by mom and pop before the fall of the Evil Empire.
Unlike clean-outs, curb stops are not visible to the naked eye. They are underground, on the water main. They are accessed using a tool that looks like a T with a long vertical leg with a socket at the end. That is inserted into a vertical pipe that extends underground to the main. The socket in the leg of the key fits over the nut on the top of the curb stop. Since everything is underground, you can’t see where a curb stop is, unless you know where it is already, or unless it is marked.
If you turned a park upside down, you would see the normally-submerged part of the iceberg exposed, inverted and above ground. That would be a spaghetti bowl of wires and pipes for gas, drinking water, storm water and waste water that birds would perch on, get tangled up in, and use as a launching pad for shit-bombs the same way they use telephone wires in the right-side-up world. You would see piers and footings that extend four feet below the frost line sticking up like stalagmites. And you might hear the muffled cries of a guy named Allan banging against the walls of his now-buried manufactured home, being slowly and painfully asphyxiated because he overstayed his welcome.
[1] A baffle is a vertical pipe just inside the septic tank, into which the intake pipe empties. The idea is that when sewage enters the baffle, solids and liquids drop down and oil and grease floats. The result is a three-layer pool of sewage with sludge on the bottom, liquid in the middle and grease on the top. Liquid flows out into the leach fields, where organic matter is broken down by bacteria. Sludge and grease are pumped periodically.
WHY OWN A PARK? BE A PLUMBER, LESS HEADACHES. MORE MONEY.