Getting Sense Drilled Into Him

Don’t you just hate looking stupid? I know some of you have had a lot of practice at it, but don’t you hate it anyway?

I sure do. Even though there are certain things I know everything about--ask me something about making cheeseburgers on a grill, go ahead and ask--there are other things I am completely stupid about.

“You want the 2.8-liter engine or the 4.0-liter engine?” a car salesman once asked me. “You do know what I’m talking about, right?”

Oh, sure. Liters? Who doesn’t know about liters? Why it was just the other day when I was in eighth grade that I last took the metric system seriously. Now lemme see: A liter is 2.36 bushel baskets, right?

Better give me the 2.8-liter engine, I told the salesman. I don’t think I’ll need much storage space.

That was three years ago and he is still laughing.

So I buy this piece of land. I don’t know anything about land. I have never even bought a house. I live in a rented house and whenever something major is required--like the gutters fill up with leaves--the landlord comes over and takes care of it for me.

I have always been a city boy, but I have always wanted to own land. It is a primal instinct, I think. Everybody wants a piece of land you can pay taxes on until you save up enough money to build a house, by which time a 7-Eleven or a topless bar will have moved in next door.

So I have this land and then I get this money. Wow, I said. I am going to take this check and build on my land. Nothing fancy. A cabin. Four sheets of plywood nailed together. A roof made of flattened beer cans. A dirt floor. And maybe a Jacuzzi.

No, wait, I said. Plywood’s too expensive. I’ll get a Sears shed. I’ve seen them advertised. Cost about 300 bucks. You can’t stand up in them, but how much time do you really spend standing up anyway?

Well, you want to know something? They won’t let you live in a Sears shed. There are people working for the county who have nothing better to do than to make rules to keep people from living in sheds.

So I went to this contractor and asked him to build me a cabin. You want to feel stupid, go talk to a contractor.

“What about water?” he said. “You know where your water is coming from?”

I figured it would come out of the faucet, I told him. (Jeez, what was I paying him for?) So put in a couple of faucets. One in the bathroom and one in the kitchen. I can fill up the Jacuzzi with buckets.

“You really think water comes from faucets?” he said.

I’m not a complete idiot, I said. I know it doesn’t come from faucets. It comes from pipes. So put in the pipes, too.

That’s when he told me about wells. At first I thought he was kidding me. He told me I had to hire a well-digger. And that this well-digger would dig a hole in the ground and water would come out of it. It was like something out of pioneer days. I felt like Daniel Boone.

But there really are well-diggers. You want to feel really stupid, go talk to one. I called a guy whose ad read: “If We Don’t Find Water, We Don’t Call It a Well.” He told me that if he didn’t find water, I wouldn’t have to pay him anything.

Great, I said. But if you don’t find water, I’m going to build anyway. I’ll just drink Perrier.

What’s the deepest you’ve ever had to drill? I asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “We’re still drilling.”

He arrived with a truck about the size of Utah and began drilling. He hit water at 60 feet.

Great, stop, don’t go any farther, I told him.

“Too shallow,” he said. “You can’t drill this shallow.”

Let me guess, I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “The county won’t let you.”

He kept drilling. I lost track of how long or how deep. But according to the bill, I think he found water about two miles down.

And I didn’t even get to taste it.

“Gotta get it tested first,” he said. “Might be bad.”

Bad? Nobody told me about bad. By now I was feeling really stupid. How can water that comes right out of the ground be bad? I asked him.

He shrugged. “Could be nitrates. Could be your coliform bacteria. But if you’re lucky, it’ll just be your minerals.”

As it turned out, the water was fine. But I’m not going to build for a while. That’s because I just found out about something called a septic field.

You wouldn’t believe it.