It was not unusual for mysterious events to take place around the Mitchell neighborhood in the 1970s. It appeared, to the untrained eye, to be just another group of normal homes with average families, but this was far from the case.
Our home, for instance, housed my widowed mother, who was creative in the arts. She was a painter, potter, seamstress, pianist, and vocal soloist.
My sister, who was six years younger than me was the genius of the siblings, and actually graduated from college. She played the oboe, which was why in the fall our yard was full of migrating ducks.
My brother, who was three years younger than me, was the talented songwriter and front man for one of Seattle’s premiere grunge bands, X-15.
I, on the other hand, being the oldest of the siblings, was lucky to be able to tie my shoes without getting drool on them.
Down the street lived my best friend, Chuck, who was my cohort in adventures and the one most likely to pull me out of the lake when I walked out too far on thin ice.
The Angel family boys lived across the street. They were the athletes and had the cool toys. Mr. Angel owned a riding motorized lawn roller which we as kids would use to see what things look liked after we flattened them.
Then, there was the legend, Elwood K Wayson, the old woodsman who lived behind our house.
Elwood, or Swede as he was known by most everyone, was in his late 80s. He could be cantankerous if he was well lit on the Canadian Mist Whisky he sipped during the day. He was my mentor for all things “outdoors.” This included hunting, fishing, trapping, stump dynamiting, and power pole climbing. I used his guns, and he gave me his 1895 Winchester shotgun. The same one he would use to shoot the ducks landing in our yard when my sister played her oboe.
Swede owned his house and a mother-in-law house next to it, both of which my mother eventually bought from him. Part of the deal of the purchase was that he could live for free in his house until he died. The second house, mom made into a rental.
Now, Swede had built both of the homes on his property, and I must admit, for a man who was not a skilled homebuilder, he did a good job. The homes were soundly constructed. To save on septic tanks and drain fields, he combined the two homes into one system for sewage. I suspect that the Building and Codes department didn’t know what he was up to.
Mom had my handyman friend named Dave do many upgrades on Swede’s house while he lived inside. Dave also renovated the mother-in-law house, and it didn’t take long after it was completed for mom to find a renter. He was a handsome, working professional in his mid-20s named Bruce.
When Bruce was moved in, we didn’t see him much. He would leave for work in the early morning and return home sometime after dark, sometimes with a lady friend. Sometimes he would stick his head into Swede’s house to check on him and share a glass of the Mist.
I stopped over to Swede’s house one evening to question him about Steelhead fishing techniques. He was lying on his bed with a glass of the Mist in his hand. His dog, Digger O’Dell, lay on the floor close enough to Swede’s bed so he could reach over and scratch her ears. On the TV was either Gunsmoke or Bonanza.
“That Bruce is quite the lady’s man,” I remarked.
“You’re not kidding,” Swede slurred. “Sometimes he has ladies over three times during the week. I don’t think I’ve seen the same one twice. Saturday nights he will have two come over. I don’t know what is going on over there. Maybe they play board games.”
A year went by. Swede got more stove-up and needed help running errands, which I was happy to help him with. We would drive into town weekly for his medicine supply at the liquor store. I drove his 1972 Dodge Ram with him riding shotgun and Digger O’Dell between us. When Digger’s head wasn’t hanging out the side window, Swede’s was.
It was perhaps a half year beyond that, that I got a call from him one afternoon.
“I was taking a shower last night and sewer water started coming up in the drain,” he said. “Now I can’t flush the toilet. You’ve got to come over and help me.”
In the era in which Swede made his drain field, they used drain tiles which were made from cement. They had a four inch inside diameter and were about sixteen inches long. You would place these tiles end-to-end in the ditch the length you wanted the drain field to be. Occasionally, a tile would break and stop the outward flow of septic water. The remedy was to open the lid of the tank, dip the contents out with a five-gallon bucket until I could see the hole for the outbound line. Then I would run a snake cable down the drain field pipe until I hit the broken tile. Pulling the snake back out of the line, I would lay the length that I pulled out, on the ground over the drain field line to determine where to dig to replace the tile. For as old as Swede’s house and septic system was, this was beginning to be a common problem.
“Doggone tiles,” I said when I got to his house. “Let’s grab the snake and uncover the tank lid.”
Every time I needed to open the septic tank lid, I first had to remove the sod on top of it. This always took twenty minutes. Once the sod was removed, the lid was revealed.
“Okay. Let’s pop the lid,” I said.
Grabbing the side of the lid opposite me with a crowbar, I pulled, lifting that side of the lid into the air.
It must have been the back pressure from sewage wanting to leave the houses, because when the lid was lifted, sewage boiled up from the tank very much like a nuclear test being performed in the ocean.
Luckily, from where I was lifting, the lid protected me from the tsunami wave which came out of the tank. Not so lucky was Swede who stood on the opposite side. The 85-year-old man whose catlike reflexes had long since lost their nine lives, couldn’t get out of the way. The look in his eyes as the septic wave washed over him haunts me to this day.
When the bubbling and boiling subsided, the dripping wet Swede stared into the tank.
“What is that?” he asked, pointing at the top of the tank.
“Come on, you’ve seen inside of a septic tank before,” I said.
“I know, but what’s that?”
I looked over the lid into the tank.
“Who cut the fingers out of rubber gloves and flushed them down the toilet?” he asked.
Floating on top of the sludge were hundreds of, not the fingers of rubber gloves, but…condoms. Hundreds of condoms, and most likely plugging the drain field.
“Their condoms, Swede. Yours?”
“Bruce!!!” He yelled.
“I’ll go get your hooligan net, Swede.”
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