Val Finds It Necessary To Raise a Stink

Sometimes Val is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Not the biggest bargain at the auction. Not the tallest bowl of soup in the kitchen.

For several months now, we have been encountering a large truck on our county road. It's a blacktop road, which shrinks a little more every time the county road crew resurfaces it. They push that hot asphalt almost to the edge. But there's a little bit of old road left. Otherwise, all of my tax money flows over the side into the ditch. You could probably determine its true age by counting the edge layers like rings of a tree. A part of it used to be gravel when we first built our house 17 years ago. And now the road has risen about a foot, and receded from the edge. It is passable for two normal-size cars, but care must be taken with buses, trash trucks, heavy equipment, and septic suckers.

Yes, the vehicle we've been running into encountering at slow speed lately is a septic sucker. You know. Those tank trucks that are full of liquids and solids (but hopefully not headless bodies) sucked from septic tanks with a hose as big as an elephant's trunk. It's always on the section of the road by the main low-water bridge, out to the lettered county highway.

I figure this truck belongs to a guy we'll call Handy. He has a big house across the side creek over his own low water bridge. We bought our old rental duplex from him. He works construction, and flips houses. Also, his family drives like coked-up bats escaping exploding Hades with a tail wind. I put two and two together, and deduced that this septic sucker belonged to Handy. And I saw it turn onto his road one time.

We used to run into encounter this septic sucker in the mornings on the way to school, around 7:00 a.m. I told The Pony I couldn't figure it out. Who runs a business like that? If they start at 7:00, wouldn't the truck be going TOWARD town instead of coming out our way? And in the evenings, we'd meet it as we returned home. Well. Now that it's summer and Val is free to cruise the county roads at will, I've noticed this truck at noon and at 1:00. Like it's going home for lunch, then back to town. Seriously. Who can afford to drive that big truck back and forth with the price of gas? It was becoming absurd. Depending on what I had to do that day, I might see this truck four times on that section of road. So I complained to Hick.

"I don't like Woody running his septic tank business out of his home. It's bad enough to get behind his dump trucks and trailers loaded with backhoes. Now I have to get over to the side of the road and let his septic truck go by."

"Woody isn't running a septic business."

"Yes he is. I pass that truck several times day. In fact, I think he might have more than one truck. And I don't see how it pays to go home for lunch every day. They really seem to work an odd schedule. Like before people get up, and after they get off work."

"He is not running a septic business. Those aren't his trucks. They're going to some other guy related to him that lives up over the hill behind his house."

"Huh. I don't know how he runs a business with those odd hours."

"They're not the other guy's trucks, either."

"You just told me they were!"

"No. I said they were going to his property."

"He must really have a septic tank problem."

"Val. They're not sucking out septic tanks here. They're dumping fill."

"WHAT? How can they do that? That's...that's...POOP!"

"They're putting in on fields for fertilizer."

"No! You can't do that with human poop!"

"Yes you can, if you have a permit."

"NO! What are they fertilizing?"

"Anything and everything."

"Uh uh. Not crops. For people! You can't put human poop on fields where you grow people food!"

"Yes you can. I don't know what they're growing."

"I have never seen any crop of any kind come out of there. I don't even think there are fields. That's back over the hill, toward the river. They're not growing crops! I think it's some kind of illegal dumping ground."

"Well, there's lots of trucks that go there every day."

Oh, dear. I am so glad those people live below us and downstream. I'm still not sure whether Hick is telling the truth of talking out his butt. But his theory would explain the constant traffic and the odd hours.