Going Commando

Sleeping Lioness
March, 2012 Mebane, NC

For me, the phrase "going commando" has nothing to do with not wearing underwear and everything to do with images of eighteen year old boys in camouflage gear getting ready to be shipped over to Viet Nam by crawling under barbed wire on their knees and elbows, their rifle held out in front of them while live gunfire whizzes over their heads.

There is a reason why they have eighteen year old kids do that. It's because they can wake up the next morning and say, "Hey, that was fun! Let's do it again!"

There is also a reason why most men more than twice their age do not do that. It's because when they wake up the next morning they feel like whatever truck ran them over in the night is still backing up and running over them again (and again and again…).

However, when one's wife smells mold in the hall bathroom and reasons there is a leak under the house and one is too poor to call a plumber, one is called to do extraordinary things. Or stupid things.

This is why, instead of reading for a bit and then falling asleep on the bus ride in to werk yesterday, I was trying my dangedest to not have to crawl under the house. I failed dismally.

Back in my home state of Maryland, at least where I grew up, houses were built on top of deep holes in the ground lined with concrete. We call them "basements." For some reason, builders in North Carolina never seemed to have heard of the word "basement." Instead, they opt for the cheaper, less user-friendly "crawlspace." A crawlspace, for those of you lucky enough to not have one, is that space between the underside of your plywood flooring and the ground. If you're lucky, your crawlspace is tall enough for you to hobble into, hunched over like the old man I'm feeling like today. If not, you get to try and slither as best you can against the ground, keeping your head low to avoid being smacked by very unforgiving floor joists.

Our crawlspace starts out with enough headspace for me to stand up on my knees. As the ground slopes upward, toward the street, the space gets more and more cramped. There are no plumbing problems that I can address in the back part of the house.

Let me also add that there are no plumbing problems I can address with any confidence, period. Yesterday's events were another instance of me practicing my I-Am-Not-A-Plumber skills. As such, I did so quite badly and over many, many hours.

The main culprit was the outdoor faucet where we connect a hose to water the plants with. Located at the very front of the house. The part with the least amount of space between the ground and the plywood flooring and the joists.

To get to this spot I have to crawl along half the length of the house, make a sharp right at one of the concrete & cinderblock foundation points, and zig-zag around another such foundation point eight or so feet away. Through this section I'm having to squeeze under heating ducts and various pipes, so I have to shift myself along on my elbows and knees. Once there, the space is so tight that in order to get out I have to do this elbow and knee commando shift backwards, feet first. This always makes for a messy experience, but yesterday's addition of more water than normal just made it all that much more special.

My first time through, to diagnose the problem, I got fairly muddy. By the sixth or seventh time going back I was an absolute mess. My jeans had such a thick layer of mud down the front that I couldn't tell if I had torn an hole in the knees or if the mud was just caked on and was starting to dry and crack in places. On my fourth trip back to DIYWorld a salesclerk laughed at me. When I knew I was just going to cap off the pipe and say to h3ll with the sillcock, I also walked through GroceryWorld to buy beer. Lots of beer.

Bonn tried to be upbeat about the situation, saying how she loves to learn new things -- something that's much more easily said by someone wearing clean, dry clothes. I'm all for learning new things, but I'm more of the "Let's let an expert handle the specialty stuff, okay?" kinda guy.

Especially when it involves going all Viet Nam commando like that.

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