NakedCity Wichita

end of the line

Posted on 08. Jul, 2011 by Adrian in op-ed

words > BART WILCOX

The incredible thing is that working at the sewage processing plant was not the crappiest job I ever had. Not in the sense that we usually mean with the word “crappy,” because ordinarily it’s a metaphor. We usually don’t literally mean “up to your chest in poop.” In THAT sense, it was, indeed, the crappiest job. As we are too fond of saying today, it’s complicated. What did I say was the incredible thing? Forget about that. The incredible thing was that the poop was the least-foul-smelling and just plain foul material that was our, uh, medium, the stuff of our art, at the City of Wichita’s South Hydraulic wastewater facility. There were the snails, after all.

O.K. I guess this calls for a flashback.

1972. Good year for a flashback. Not a good time for a young man with a young wife and young baby with no marketable skills (and I mean none of us) to be looking for a job in Wichita, in the midst of a perennial aircraft industry recession. Then came the blissful day when the city called to offer me the groundskeeper job with the Wichita Water Department. “Groundskeeper,” I repeated dreamily, “water department.” In the fantasy, I labored simply, nobly, and with a great tan, along the tree-lined banks of a majestic reservoir. In reality, I drove our hobbling, un-air-conditioned Mustang south in the summer heat to my new job, as I was instructed, south, south and further south. Where was the crystalline lake? The fairy wood? I was getting a little bored with reality.

And then reality began to stink. Really stink. It was just a few notes in the air at first, weirdly sweet, like someone had farted through a donut. Then muscular, a Class Five stench. I arrived at the threshold where the sign read “Water Pollution Control.” The “water” part registered vaguely with me. But by this time the fantasy had evaporated and the odor had become … hallucinogenic. An odor that was no longer an odor but a living thing. Something that entered you and replaced your DNA so that you were made of the odor. An odor that spoke to you, saying, “Thou shalt have no other smells before me. Lo, I am with you always, even after the burning of your clothes.”

Then I met my new co-workers and thought, “These guys are really not happy to see me.” Turns out their faces were just frozen in the original expression they had when they first came through the gate as I did. I later met their wives and kids. They all had it. Same expression. “Rictus,” I believe, is the term. I still have it.

My boss was a grizzled old German—I liked to imagine a spike affixed to the top of his hard hat—who clearly thought my talents and great wit should be rewarded with something better than endless hours of sunning like a lizard sucking a Marlboro and sometimes piloting the John Deere tractor-mower into the one tree on twenty acres of our little paradise. So, I was soon promoted from Groundskeeper to Snail Driver.

Now, to the snails and the “liquid waste” phase of water pollution control. All the wastewater of Wichita flowed in one huge pipe to the north treatment plant and then on south to ours. On the grounds were several circular concrete beds, a couple of hundred feet across and filled with rocks. Rotating over the rocks were giant carousel sprinkler arms. A Six Flags of Sewage. Do I have to tell you what was being sprinkled? Good. You’re still with me? Amazing. Anyway, the, um, tinkle water percolated through the rocks to become Happy Water that could be poured into the river. The rocks were covered with a particular culture of algae that liked to take the tinkle out of the water and use it for its own unknown, unsavory purposes. Not important. As it happens, this is a very attractive environment for fresh water snails. Lots and lots and lots of snails, clinging happily to the rocks. The snails would eventually die or, I don’t know, get tired or pass out from the smell. They would let go and be washed to the bottom of the filter bed and then take a final Valhalla snail ride on a grain auger to the bed of a dump truck. So, on any given day there would be a few tons of Snail Chili simmering in the 100-degree heat. It was, of course, the fragrance of cooking snails—and not the kind with the garlic butter and the little forks—that had greeted me on my first day.

A snail truck had special status at the city dump a few miles up the road. The dump guys would wave you off like you were landing a 747 that was on fire. I usually had my own private corner of the landfill. On one particularly busy day, some poor sucker backed one of those enormous garbage trucks next to mine, and had just stepped down from his cab when I saw the familiar nerve-gassed-gerbil look hit his face, followed by the characteristic gasping, the clawing at the throat.

“Wha-wha-WHA-OH-GAA-GACK-GAAH-what iz ZA GAH?” he managed with his head between his knees, quivering hand pointing to my truck.

“Snails,” I answered proudly, dropping the lever and releasing a fresh tsunami of Eau de Mollusk.

“Gah! Gah Aggh!” he replied, and sped away, his garbage intact.

When you can induce gag reflex in a guy who drives garbage for a living you’re showing the boss some serious poo-tential. Having thus distinguished myself, I was promoted from Snail Driver to Poo Hoser and placed inside something called a digester. We have now graduated to the “solid” phase. So, stop and take a deep breath … and … hold it. A digester was a three-story circular tank dozens of feet across, in which Wichita’s solid sludge was made environmentally acceptable so that it could be returned to society—a kind of poo rehab. This process was aided by microorganisms that, like me, had no better prospects at the moment. And it produced a lot of methane, some of which actually heated our big crock-pot of poo. The rest burned as a torch at the top of the digester’s roof and could have been promoted by a cleverer tourism office as the World’s Largest Lit Fart.

Since my luck was really holding out so far, I was also lucky enough to have arrived at the end of the digester’s 12-year cycle, when it had to be emptied because the microorganisms had grown too depressed to show up for the job. My job was to hose down the uncooperative twenty-foot mountains of sludge that were left when they pumped out the tank. “Sludge” being the official Water Department code word for “poo,” and “poo” being an oversimplification. This substance was really an enticing and aromatic farrago of ingredients, including everything that had been flushed by everyone in Wichita in the previous decade and that was not degradable. Do not make me list these things. You know who you are and what you flushed condoms that you shouldn’t have. And there it all was, mingled with many tons of resourceful snails that had escaped the ride to the dump, towering over me like Mount Pooji.

I would be lowered from a hole in the roof, in the pitch black, on a rickety extension ladder, with a flashlight in my mouth and clutching the business end of a two-inch fire hose. The kind of hose you usually see a couple of guys wrestling to subdue warehouse fires or human rights protestors. Except that generally they’re not leveraging several hundred pounds’ pressure of untreated tinkle. That’s right. Supplied by a centrifugal pump stuck in a giant pool of liquid wastewater. This is described in Dante’s “Inferno” as the “Sustainable” Circle of Hell.

The ladder wouldn’t quite reach the floor and was simply dangling from a rope, so I would just rocket around freely under the jet force of the fire hose—like that garden-hose Water Wiggle toy that knocked the neighbor kid’s teeth out—the wildly dancing beam of my flashlight illuminating avalanches of poo, while in my mind a Navy recruiting poster loomed like the sunset behind Mount Pooji.

I don’t want to leave you with a one-dimensional view of the water pollution control operation of this fine city. They were good guys. Aside from those areas where I might be literally up to my chest in poop, it was one of the cleanest places I have ever worked, including almost any restaurant. And they’d spray countless 55-gallon drums of industrial strength Turd Blossom Glade into the air around the facilities, trying valiantly to mask the smell for our pampered city noses. But still, these days, at cocktail hour, when we’re betting on who’s had the crappiest job? Just remember. I’m all in.

Tags: bart wilcox, creative writing, liquid waste, sewage processing, sewage treatment, snails, wichita comedy