MAAAAARK TWAAAAAIIINNN

This morning at 8:30 AM the village guys and the sewer liners began to get organized. At 9AM the steamshovel (well, actually they call it an “excavator” now, but it’s still two stories tall and looks like a dinosaur) hit the pavement hard with with its shovel -- BAM! This little house jumped on its foundation, the two cats jumped in the air, and I jumped, too, even though I was watching the monster teeth bite down. After that there were no cats around. I don’t know whether they went out to the back garage or dove into the closet to hide. I myself dutifully abstained from using any drains, depending on the camping toilet I bought just in case.

All day the guys out there in their Carhartts and knit caps measured and dug and marked both sewer caps and snow with pale blue spray paint (Della Robbia Blue -- well, more Wedgewood). The international code for sewer pipe is this sky blue. I don’t know what the color for water pipe is. Hot pink? Gas might be yellow. AS the day went on the cats became more confident.

After the big machines -- one is REALLY big and the other is pretty big -- broke through the street surface and carefully pulled out dirt, going down as deep as a man is tall, guys got in there with shovels to do the delicate last bit of exhumation. They had instruments that could tell them when they were getting close. When the sewer pipe was uncovered, it looked like an old bone.

The streets in this village were laid out a hundred years ago to accommodate horse teams and wagons turning around, so there’s plenty of room for big machinery, trenches, two lanes of passage and even parking. I think most people on the block found someplace else to be -- there are four houses on the other side, one with small children, and three houses on this side plus the Baptist church. Through all the crashing and grinding, the church bells went on bonging out the hours and hymns with their usual gusto. The trench went between two of the row of boulevard trees, cutting roots.

Strange sounds and terrible smells (more chemical than excremental) rose into my bathroom. Crackers went to see what the noise was, encountered the smells and backed out slowly with her fur standing up in a ridge.

I thought they would have the trenches closed by evening, but it’s seven “post meridian” and the news has ended. It's dark. I went out for the dozenth time in my carpet slippers and double fleece shirts to see whether I could pee in my own pot tonight. “Give us ten more minutes,” said the fellow feeding cable into the manhole. Someone in the front of the lit truck was operating machinery while the fellow with the cable watched the video screen and told him: “Four feet! Three feet! This is it!” I asked if he ever sang out, “Maaaarrrk Twaaaaaiiin.” He recognized the joke and laughed. Then I sang him a bit of Belafonte, “one foot, two foot...” but he’s too young for that. I had to do something to keep warm. It’s sinking down to eight tonight and I hadn’t planned to walk that far up the block. But it was fascinating -- a familiar sight made new by man-deep square holes and tall dirt piles.

The two excavators are parked to block the open trenches. There are traffic cones, ladders put sideways, big dayglo warning signs (the kind that are fabric that unfolds), but not many lights. I miss those old round stinking oilpots that used to mark highway work -- flickering smoky yellow flames. After WWII it seemed as though they were everywhere my family went on trips. Recently I saw that a person could buy them from a catalog for one’s patio. Nowadays serious highway crews use flashers on yellow plastic sawhorses, but I don’t see any out there. We’re a cautious community and Halloween was LAST night, so it will probably be all right.

“Four feet, three feet, that’s IT!” And the video camera shows a little cutting tool turning on its side and biting into the liner. The cutter barely fits inside the liner, which is marked where the hole ought to be. If it works, I can take a shower tonight. And wash the dishes. The big guy with the pink face said he would come and tell me. “It was a long day,” he said and took another pinch of Copenhagen. Tomorrow’s temp is supposed to rise above freezing.

The gibbous moon is gauzy, so there must be vapor in the air. Snow has withdrawn from the path I carelessly shoveled and is compacted where it wasn’t shoveled. I should be able to drive without having to throw some old tires in the back of the pickup to help with traction, but I think I’ll throw them in anyway after I take out to the dump the last of the leaves and the old busted combustion lawnmower the last owner of this place left behind. I had fantasies about getting it fixed, but nothing like thinking about sewers to get one’s mind focussed on reality.

I’ll dream tonight about the rosy-faced young man out there in the dark, talking to an unseen person inside the truck, standing in the only light on the street, watching a tiny video screen and paying out his cable with all the seriousness of Mark Twain on a paddlewheeler, keeping the boat in the channel. “Just give us another ten minutes or so!” he says cheerfully. He’s coming up on a twelve hour day. He won’t have trouble sleeping.