10. Best Not To Think About It

We had been in our new home for exactly three weeks. In that time, we had unloaded a moving truck and a POD, filled the garage, weed-whacked most of the property, cleared the drainage ditch in front of the house, pulled out blackberry vines, and cut back some of the many, many rose bushes that attacked our arms and legs whenever we tried to walk past them. We had felled half a dozen trees, including a liquid amber that must have been more than a hundred feet tall but had committed the unfortunate offense of growing in the way of the giant sequoia. We had removed moldy wallboard, insulation, and exterior shingles from the ADU and bathroom. We had repaired various small things, abated a yellow-jacket nest in the ground, and made enough trips to the dump that the people working there were beginning to recognize us. We had, in other words, made remarkable progress.

The house had not. On the one night Erin and I had the place to ourselves, we decided to celebrate by lighting a fire. Inside the fireplace was a dead bird. It lay with its wings fully outstretched, almost ceremonially, as if it had died attempting to make a point. I stared at it. Was this an omen of some sort? I decided it was not. This was California wine country. Birds died. Chimneys existed. Sometimes these things intersected.

I removed the bird and placed it outside on a windowsill, where for reasons I cannot now explain, I allowed it to remain for several days before finally putting it in the trash. Unsure why I didn't burry it. I had briefly forgotten that we now lived in the country and put the trash out the night before collection. In the morning, I discovered something had burrowed through the heavy plastic bag and eaten the bird. Only the wings remained. They were lying side by side in almost exactly the same position they had been in when attached to the body. I looked at them for a while. Then I looked across the street, where the enormous white Colorado mountain dogs were barking continuously at me. Then I began putting our trash into new bags and picking pieces of garbage out of the road. There are moments in life when symbolism is best ignored. Several days later, we returned from a family reunion in the mountains. That evening, our son came into the living room. “My bathroom smells bad.” “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “No,” Sava corrected, “it smells really bad.” This was not the endorsement I had hoped for. “Okay. I’ll check it out.”

I tiredly lifted myself out of the chair. I got halfway down the hall before the smell hit me. It was not so much an odor as a physical presence. I instinctively covered my nose and mouth and opened the bathroom door. Septic. Not a faint septic smell. Not the suggestion of septic. It smelled as though someone had removed the lid from the septic tank and installed our bathroom directly inside it. I gagged and reached for the exhaust fan, having forgotten the dial had crumbled off a week before.

I was beginning to think this was simply how the house communicated.

I turned on the shower to make sure the P-trap was full. I ran the sink. I flushed the toilet. Nothing. My stomach was starting to sour. I backed out of the bathroom, shoved a towel against the bottom of the door, gagged again, and walked toward the living room. The smell followed me.

“Eww,” said Erin. “What is that?”

“What did you do?” Sava asked.

Me? What did *I* do?

I opened windows. The smell remained. “I don't know what it is. I’ll call the pump guy. He told me he knows a septic guy.” The septic guy said he could come the next day.

That night, I attempted to restore morale. I recounted everything we had accomplished since arriving and proposed that if every member of the family unpacked just one box a day, we would be completely moved in before we knew it. Erin looked around.

“The house might be a mess,” she said, “but it’s our mess.” We owned it outright. No mortgage. Our land. Our trees. Our greenhouse. Our septic smell. “Yay,” Sava said in her quiet voice. It was perhaps the least convincing celebration of debt-free homeownership ever recorded. I told everyone I was going to bed. During the night, I woke to coyotes howling somewhere nearby, joined intermittently by the giant white dogs across the street. Eventually I fell back asleep.

Then cars came racing down Sexton Road at what sounded like a hundred miles an hour. I fell asleep again. And dreamed. I was standing at the far corner of our property, digging a deep hole. I understood it to be a grave. Then I was driving a bulldozer across the property, tearing apart the land in a single, perfectly straight line. Then I woke up. It was a dream I would have again. The morning was unusually warm. By eight it was already in the high seventies, and the forecast called for temperatures in the nineties. Ninety degrees in Colorado could sometimes be pleasant. Here, with the moisture in the air, it felt different.

I put on shorts and a T-shirt and went outside to meet Jesus, who had brought his old friend Jaime to help finish removing the siding from the ADU. Jaime was an interesting older man who told me immediately he was from Tijuana and his friends called him Tijua. While Jesus spoke very very slowly as if the words were being freshly minted as they emerged from his lips, Jaime was more wiry and active and he spoke effortlessly and with a sense of excitement. I was happy to have someone who reportedly had 25 years as a framer and he was happy to share with me images of himself on job sites going way back to when he was a younger bearded man, but he told me immediately that because he had been brought on by Jesus, Jesus was the boss.

While they worked, I wandered the property. There were still parts of it I had barely seen. I discovered apple trees I hadn't noticed before. An Asian pear tree producing strangely dry pears. A mulberry tree covered in ants. A bottlebrush. Several unidentified fruit or nut trees. Grape vines that did not appear interested in producing grapes. There were two arbors in inexplicable locations, one of which appeared to be deciding whether to collapse from rot or termites. There were oaks, a willow, several weeping willows, and several of the trees I had always known only as “poverty trees,” a name I remembered from a poem I'd once heard at a writing conference. Writing felt like another lifetime. I couldn't imagine having enough time to write in my new life.

Beside the outdoor bathroom someone had constructed in the yard were dozens of old bags of chicken manure. There was what appeared to be an abandoned compost pile in one corner of the property. The greenhouse was probably 130 degrees inside and so overgrown with succulents and weeds that entering it seemed both unpleasant and possibly dangerous. That was a project for another time. Everything was a project for another time. Rose bushes and blackberry vines divided the property into various no-go zones. I pulled open the heavy, squeaking door of the well house. The smell hit me immediately. Dirt. Mouse urine. Rat urine. Something dead, perhaps. The tanks connected to our drinking water were covered in rodent droppings. Not a few. Every available surface.

The electronic control head for the water softener had accumulated so much excrement that I could barely see the top of it. Where there weren't droppings, there was dust. Where there wasn't dust, there were cobwebs. The floor was covered in silt and feces. I looked upward and realized I could see through into the garage. Along the ledge between the two structures were more piles of droppings and cobwebs. I stepped farther inside to see behind the tanks and immediately walked face-first into a spiderweb. I brushed it frantically from my face and retreated. The door had come partly off its track, so closing it required lifting and shoving at the same time. I finally got it shut. That was another project for later.

But I couldn't quite shake the thought that somewhere inside that room, beneath the dust, dirt, animal excrement, cobwebs and insect carcasses, was our drinking water. Best not to think about it. I went into the garage instead. This did not improve things. All of our belongings were stacked neatly inside in clean U-Haul boxes. Above them was an ancient wooden framework covered in what appeared to be several generations of cobwebs. Old shelving units screwed to the walls were layered with rodent droppings, dead insects and dirt. In the rafters, previous owners had laid boards and stored plastic pots and other things I couldn't identify. I got a ladder. This was a mistake. On top of the boards were several inches of accumulated filth: rat nests, droppings, dried fruit, nuts carried in from the garden, insect remains and various organic materials I preferred not to identify. I climbed back down.

Directly beneath all of it sat our perfectly clean boxes containing nearly everything we had brought from our previous life. For some reason, this reminded me of the drinking water. I needed to do something. But what? And where exactly did one begin? The well house? The greenhouse? The garage? The actual house? The house house? Before I could answer, Sava called from the kitchen.

“The water smells like a swamp.” Of course it did. I went inside. She turned on the faucet. Sulfur. Strong sulfur. “That probably isn't good.” I texted the pump guy, who had performed the well inspection before we bought the house and had, through no fault of his own, become my primary point of contact for nearly every rural emergency. *Do you know anyone who handles water quality? Or the filtration system in the well house?* Even thinking about the well house made my stomach turn.

“Don't drink the water,” I called. “I've been drinking it,” Erin said. “Once you get past the smell, it's not bad.” I looked at her with concern. “Just...I wouldn't,” I said, not wanting to share what I had seen in the well house. “We should get bottled water for now.” At that moment, Jesus appeared at the entrance to the ADU.

“Boss,” he called in his slow drawl. “There's something you need to see.” I started toward him. Then I noticed an older woman standing at the back fence. She was petting our dogs. I stopped. I had never seen her before.