DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

A septic tank is a multi-hundred-gallon container that temporarily stores all the liquid waste produced by the property’s inhabitants. By “liquid waste” I mean “everything that goes down the drain”, and that does include toilets, so yes, there is solid waste in there too.

In fact it’s the solid waste that causes the problem. The liquids run out into the leach field and dissipate into the ground, but the solids collect in the tank. Some portion of this muck gets digested by the bacteria and microflora naturally present in such an environment, but the rest sits there stinking until it’s removed. Experts recommend that tanks be pumped out every five years or so, depending how heavily they’ve been used.

Our system has not been heavily used. Just two of us live here, and we’ve been more or less vegan for the past year, which I’ve heard makes a difference. But when the inspector popped the top on the tank, he confirmed that it was due to be pumped. This was his official diagnosis: “It looks pretty cakey in there.”

Then I remembered all the little lumps and dregs of sourdough starter and dough that I’ve washed down the kitchen sink over the past five years. A sourdough culture might not flourish anaerobically, without fresh starch to feed on, but then again, who am I to say what might evolve in that awesome biomass buried in my yard? They say there are alligators in the NYC sewers after all.

So I had to laugh when the inspector said that the contents of our septic tank looked “cakey.” Actually I thought “bready” would be a more accurate term, but I didn’t want to argue. I didn’t even want to breathe, at least not until he screwed the lid back down.

The hotel clerk was a diminutive Indian woman — young, perhaps 5'2'' and extremely slender. If I’d thought about it, I’d have expected her to be a vegetarian, based on her age, her size, and the fact that we were standing in California. Plus, given her ethnic background, she’d probably have a thing about cows.

So I asked her for restaurant recommendations. She reeled off a list of places that shared a common menu: cattle. She named grills, burger places, steakhouses. She became an animated Zagat’s Guide to local stockyards, so much so that she even realized it and apologized, then appended breathlessly, “… but I don’t know what kind of food you like, I like STEAK!” When she said “STEAK!” she actually growled. Her eyes bulged, her lips pulled back to reveal too many teeth, and I swear, I could see the cords in her neck go taut.

This was the first conscious thought I had this morning: olive oil comes from squeezing olives… peanut oil comes from squeezing peanuts… where the heck does baby oil come from?

I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere before — it’s not original. My concern is that this was not a very energizing, welcome-to-the-new-day thought to wake up to. It’s pretty grisly, or even gristly, depending how hard you squeeze.

Estes Cone is an 11,000-foot peak in the Rocky Mountains in central Colorado. The trailhead sits at 9400 feet, so the total elevation gain is 1600 feet, or about 1/3 of a mile.

The first two miles of the hike climb gradually. This makes for an easy walk, unless it’s your first day at 9400 feet and you’ve developed pulmonary edema from exerting yourself in the thin air. That would tend to slow you down. (Hiking tip for novices: if you begin to cough up blood, you should probably turn around.)

Between the 2 and 2.5 mile points, the trail gains about 500 feet of elevation. That’s a foot of rise for every five of run. In thin air, this begins to hurt. The pain is exacerbated by the great condition of the trail, which poses no impediment to speed; hikers can climb as fast as their lungs will allow.

The final half-mile of this trail requires a climb of 700 feet. But this section of the trail begins with a somewhat shallow incline and then turns significantly steeper further up the mountain, so at its worst, ascending this trail feels a lot like climbing stairs.

The quality of the trail degenerates here, too. The prescribed route is an arbitrary path up a rocky hillside; it is indistinguishable from the surrounding jumble of uneven stones, except for the cairns, man-made piles of rocks, that mark the edge of the path. This terrain makes for slow progress: each footfall must be chosen with care, lest one’s hiking partners are in the mood to call in for an airlift rescue.

People coming down the trail, suffused with the accomplishment of having gotten to whatever point they’d gotten to, often feel compelled to comment to those still on their way up. I found this immediately annoying. The fact that someone got out of bed a half-hour before me does not give him or her the right to tease me about how much harder the trail gets. I was only somewhat less displeased by the well-meaning but meddlesome foreigners who encouraged me that “it’s not too much farther!” as if there was any question I would make it.

One particularly egregious bozo, the self-appointed entertainment committee for a pod of overfed hiking companions, made a crack about the tough climb I faced. Trail manners dictate that people on the descent stand aside to allow climbers to pass, in deference to gravity and momentum, but this guy made no such pause… His mind was so enfeebled by the urge to utter this stimulating remark that he could not simultaneously manage to step off the path: “If you think this is hard, wait until you get to the top!”

Were I a mathemetician, I would describe my amusement at this comment by referencing the null set: {}. But I’m not a mathemetician, so I have to express my amusement by writing this 608-word essay on my website.

Because I was climbing, focused on continuing upward progress and staying on the elusive trail, I had only a fraction of my mental faculties available to formulate a pithy response. But I succeeded, in a rare moment of linguistic lucidity that has been only slightly embellished in this semi-fictional retelling. In answer to the man’s taunt, I replied casually, “Oh, I know how hard it gets — I’m just going back up there to retrieve my car keys.”

It is a testament to the intoxicating effect of oxygen deprivation that I laughed about my own joke all the way to the top of the Cone.

This is the Good Samaritan Hospital’s idea of a vegetarian breakfast: greasy sausage, scrambled eggs, and a pot of oatmeal with a skin so thick it must have also come, somehow, from an animal. Also, the food tray offered the hospital’s ubiquitous serving of Jello substitute, a generic geletin whose label actually reads, “gel-type dessert.”

Generally the nurses don’t ask what flavor gelatin the patient wants — they ask what color. That should give you an idea of the product’s nutritive value.

It may be that our order for non-beast meals was misplaced. We put in another request and were gratified to find that subsequent meals were more in line with our expectations — although still not anything to be enthusiastic about. One of my co-workers pointed out that the insurance companies are probably behind this poor-food initiative, on the theory that if patients hate the meals they might stay fewer nights.

One entree triggered a pleasant wave of nostalgia. Until about a year ago, one of my all-time favorite dishes was a peculiar American concoction called “grilled cheese.” Because this might mean different things to different people, I’ll explain the recipe in detail: put two slices of American cheese between two slices of white bread, pan-fry in butter, and serve hot with tomato soup. In a pinch, ketchup can be substituted for soup. But by no means can one use wheat bread or put ham or Swiss cheese into the sandwich. Occasional uses of alternative (non-Swiss) cheeses are tolerated, so long as they melt, and they don’t come from goats.

These days I avoid white bread, cheese, and anything fried in butter, but the sight of this sandwich presented a temptation I was unable to resist. Steam-soggy and cooling, it had no business tasting as good as it did. I’d have traded my salmon plate ($5.10 from the hospital cafeteria) for a few ounces of ketchup. But, I’m now happy to say, I ate only a bite of the sandwich; I was afraid I’d be next in line for abdominal surgery if I’d eaten any more.

In fact that’s probably the real reason hospital food is so bad… they’re just ensuring a steady supply of future customers.