Why Our Shit Don't Stink

“Do you think it’s full yet?” is a far-too-common question around our home, and oftentimes first thing in the morning. “Do you think the pumpout is full?” Mark will ask me on his way to the head.

“Pumpout” is our term for “sewage.” The sewage tank holds 50 gallons, and emptying it is the bane of our chores together. (Frequent readers of this blog will be familiar with the pump out process…it’s gotten no fewer than four entries.) Actually, pumping out is not that big of a deal – you cruise on over to the dock, tie up, put the nozzle of the pumpout hose into the spigot in the deck, and 7-10 minutes later, the shit is gone and you’re on your way.

Oh, were it that simple. The problem is we never know when it’s full, we’re always guessing, and oftentimes, we guess wrong. We look for telltale signs that it’s full, like a gurgling noise, or a slower flush, or the fact that neither of us can remember the last time we pumped out. But the fact is that sometimes we don’t know it’s full till it overflows into the bilge – the small hatch in the floor in the bow, where two bunk beds serve as my office. The office starts to smell like shit, and then the whole boat, and then we not only have to pump out the holding tank, but Mark hauls the hose into the bow to suck out the overflow. Rinse, repeat.

So Mark bought a sensor. He and his friend Carl hooked it up. It works by two electrical wires suspended in the sewage tank which transmit a current and identify when the tank is at a ¼, ½, ¾, and then a red light flashes when you better empty the tank. But before it will work, it has to be calibrated to empty and full, and before we can calibrate it, we have to figure out when it’s full, and so every morning I’ve been checking the bilge for overflow, and we looked for the tell-tale signs. Except this time, there were no signs – two inches of sewage suddenly appeared in the bilge, and at 7 AM we were at the pumpout dock, Mark in the bow with the hose and some bleach.

I thanked him for doing the crappiest job possible while I waited on the dock. “This is the last time,” I assured him.

I’m sure there’s some metaphor for life in all this, some metaphor about the first year of marriage – that we are learning to handle our shit together, learning how to get rid of it and not let it overflow and stink up our life. I wish there were some sensor to let us know when the stress and anxiety of daily living was getting to be too much and we needed to purge lest it clog up our happy home. And since I like to draw big universal lessons from the mundane, I will muse that the first year of marriage is all about learning to calibrate.