If I happen to notice the garbage collectors when they roll down the back lane in the wee hours of a Friday morning, I like to wave to them from the kitchen window, even though none of them ever see me. Sometimes I’ll lift my palm toward them and offer a quick ad hoc, blue-collar benediction: May you be safe in your work, and may you know the goodness of your labour. I’m grateful for those bundled, burly men and their repetitive work, especially in January, when the temperature dips below minus thirty-five degrees Celsius and even a mild breeze can make the air feel like it has fangs and claws. From the comfort and warmth of my old house, I salute and bless those city employees handling my frozen bags of trash, and then I turn back to my cup of coffee and whatever book I’m reading and carry on with my day, mostly forgetting about them and their labour for another seven days.

There are a whole lot of us who spend most of our workdays working mostly with fingertips and eyeballs, reading, scrolling, typing. I proclaim a kind of moral superiority, declaring my affinity for the Luddites of old and their resistance to new technologies. Truth is, though, I’m writing this very essay on a shiny new MacBook. My smartphone is seven iterations past new, but even so it is a positively dazzling piece of advanced electronics. Never mind my own devices: my day-to-day life, with all its orderliness, comfort, safety, reliability, and routine, is so utterly dependent on countless computers, networks, cables, satellites, and massive hydroelectric generating stations that I cannot even imagine what my life would be like without them. My life depends on countless highly advanced technologies. And as long as that fragile, ubiquitous, high-tech ecosystem of wires, chips, and electromagnetic waves functions properly, life chugs along.

All those everyday technologies, and all the convenience and luxury they afford, have trained me to expect my life to be orderly and frictionless, dust-free, vermin-free, bug-free, germ-free, slime-free, and odourless. And mostly it is. Most of us are accustomed to tidy, reliable, hygienic, man-made ecosystems largely cut off from the natural world and from a lot of the natural things about ourselves.  The windows in my house have mesh screens to keep out the biting insects; when I flush the toilet, I send off my bodily waste with barely a whiff; warm water, scented soap, and an indoor shower keep most of my objectionable body odours mostly at bay. And the garbage guys pick up the trash every Friday. Thank God for all of it. In no way do I pine nostalgically for the seventeenth century and its coal fires, outdoor latrines, rats, lice, fleas, biannual baths, and so-called dentistry. But gross jobs are still part of life. We’ve just divvied up roles such that we can mostly hire someone else to do the dirty work.

I have three post-secondary degrees that, added up, make a pretty decent liberal arts education, for which I am grateful. But these days I mostly earn a living fixing and renovating people’s homes. I’ve done manual labour nearly all my life, the kind of work that burns a lot of calories and tires me out; repetitive work that demands efficiency and speed; heavy work that requires strong arms, legs, feet, and hands. Some of my jobs take some genuine understanding: last week I had to expand a basement stairwell opening, a job that required moving electrical cables for the furnace, dryer, hot-water tank, basement lights, and smoke alarm, and then building a new set of stairs, which is surprisingly tricky. Sometimes the jobs I do are gross.

Raking

When I was in college, I had a summer job with a municipal parks crew in south-central Alberta, Canada, helping tend a handful of camping and fishing sites. The campsite toilets all had septic tanks underneath, and in the fall the park manager would hire an operator to come around with his service truck to drain the tanks. A farmer had given permission to unload all the waste onto one of his nearby fields, a good deal for the park because it meant free waste disposal, and a good deal for the farmer because human shit is a lot like non-human shit in that it makes great fertilizer.

Only trouble was that all the extra non-shit junk—tampons, applicators, menstrual pads, panties, plastic utensils, tinfoil, fishing line, men’s underwear, socks, Styrofoam food containers, beer cans, condoms, pop bottles, chip bags, fat wads of toilet paper, six-pack rings, plastic grocery bags, diapers, and any of the other non-biodegradable garbage people had thrown into the toilet—also wound up on the farmer’s field. So the deal was that the park was responsible for cleaning up the garbage, an unpleasant but more-or-less manageable job once the waste had all dried up. The year I worked at the park, John, my boss, hadn’t gotten around to arranging the usual fall cleanup, so seven months of weather—fall rain, freezing, snow, thaw, runoff, spring rains, and wind—had pulverized everything that much more and had strewn it over a wider area. When I started in May, the mess still needed to be raked, piled, bagged, and hauled to the dump, so John gathered us one morning and explained the situation and told us today was the day. “It’ll be a bit gross,” he said, “but if we all work together, we’ll be done in a few hours.”

We loaded garden rakes and black plastic garbage bags into the truck, and five of us, including John, drove up to the hilltop field. We could see a broad patch with dirty, gritty, grainy, grimy, mostly white bits of windblown garbage. “Here we go, boys,” John said. When we opened the doors, the wind blew the cab full of dirt. I wondered if it might be better if it wasn’t so dry, if there was a bit of rain. But then what, we could walk through slightly moist, slimy, slippery feces? No, I thought. Dry is better.

Everyone grabbed a rake and a bag, and we spread out to the rough perimeter of the mess and started working our way around the edge, dragging garbage toward the centre. John started cracking jokes right away. “If any of you find half a pack of Juicy Fruit out there, I dropped mine in the toilet when I was taking a dump last August, so if you can just pocket that for me, I’d be grateful. Help yourself to a piece if you like.”

Like I said, it was a dry, windy day. All five of us pulling rakes through dry earth and garbage, every tine of every rake lifting a puff of dust, made for a full-blown localized dust storm. I tried to breathe through my nose to filter out all the airborne bits, but after a couple minutes I was working up a sweat and had to breathe through my mouth. “Hey, Kurt,” hollered John, “I think I might have found your undies over here. Do you need them right now, or do you want me to keep them in my pocket for you?” I squinted against the wind, but my eyes kept getting grit in them. The patch of garbagy land was small enough we could still hear John’s jokes over the wind. “Does anyone know what these little plastic torpedo things are for? If you guys don’t mind saving them, I’d like to take them home for my kids to play with.” Ha ha. You’re so funny. Watch me laugh. This sucks.

As the wind picked up, the cloud of grit grew thicker and, I kid you not, enormous tumbleweeds rolled across the field. It felt like a scene from a National Geographic photo of inmates working in a sandstorm in the outback, only less glamorous. “Oh, wow, look at this. Panties! I’m gonna take these home for my wife. She’ll love these. Not sure her butt’s that big, but she’ll probably grow into them some day.” I tried not to think about what kinds of particles were sticking to my eyeballs, gumming up my teeth, coating my respiratory system.  Could I be inhaling spores from some incurable disease? What kind of illness might I catch from breathing pulverized sewer residue? What if I catch Ebola or cholera, or maybe the hantavirus? Might I be patient zero for some weird new windborne disease, pathogens having flourished and mutated over the summer in a dark, cozy septic tank just waiting for a warm pair of pink lungs to colonize and decimate? “Hey, does any of you know what these little pillow things are for? Think my kids would like to play with those?” It might be more hygienic to scrub my teeth with the toilet brush stashed behind the commode in the truck-stop restroom in Chamberlain, Saskatchewan.

After about an hour John ran out of jokes. Better not to laugh or even smile because every single time we opened our mouths we were literally ingesting or inhaling tiny particles of poo. The wind had grown strong enough to whip up enough dust that I couldn’t see more than a hundred yards past any of my reluctant co-workers. No one complained and none of us quit. Two hours in, John said, “All right, that’s enough, let’s get out of here.” We tied up our bags and threw them and the rakes into the box of the truck and went back to the warehouse to pat as much grit out of our clothes as we could, wash our faces, rinse our mouths and ears, and scrub our hands more carefully and thoroughly than we ever had before in our lives.

Removing Carpet

The middle-aged woman who needed some help had been in the subsidized housing suite for nearly twenty years, and she was a serious smoker. I had been to her apartment once before with a couple earnest youth group kids and well-meaning do-gooders, all of us gung-ho to help tidy up her place and put up a fresh coat of paint to brighten the rooms. Our first task was to wash the walls, so five of us came over on a Friday evening with buckets, a two-liter carton of TSP crystals, sponges, rags, and ladders, and after more than two hours we’d only cleaned up the bathroom and the entryway. At first glance I thought the walls were beige. They were in fact, I learned, painted bright white, but they were covered with a uniform film of tobacco smoke and tar stains. Let’s call it a patina. That’s the term glass-half-full salespeople use when the refinished surface of hardwood flooring doesn’t turn out right, or when the marble floor tile starts to stain.

I grew up with a mother, and now live with a similarly inclined wife, for whom domestic cleanliness is the primary means of maintaining order and calm. I’d seen two decades of not-cleaning only in abandoned homes, never in someone’s living space. Accumulated mess and disorder from the simple passage of time is one thing—the overgrown weeds in an untended garden, for example—but accumulated human-made mess makes me queasy. Say, for instance, the layers of skin flakes and hair that collect between a mattress and bedframe, or the white gooey buildup between the bristles of my kids’ toothbrushes. Likewise the patina. Sponging the sheen of tar, I battled my gag reflex as the burnt-orange watery mess streamed down the walls, ran between my fingers, and trickled down my arms.

This time I’d come to her place to help my friend Mark take an old carpet out of her bedroom. She’d told him it was in bad shape and needed to go, and she asked him to take it out for her. So Mark asked me if I had any experience taking out carpet or if I had any special sort of tools he might need. I think what he really needed was some solidarity: if you’ve got some company, you can share stories with them and hopefully have a good laugh about it all someday.

We were there to take out carpet, but I knew that she’d had bedbugs in her suite in the past, so I bought two XL disposable Tyvek painting suits, one for each of us, masks and gloves, and a roll of duct tape to seal off the sleeves and pant legs. I have never had bedbugs in any of the places I’ve lived, but I have heard so many horror stories about them I think I would rather burn my house to the ground than deal with an infestation.

Mark and I went over to her place on a hot summer afternoon with our disposable suits, gloves, masks, pry bars, utility knives, and heavy-duty black plastic garbage bags. The two of us suited up at the landing just outside her apartment. We looked like extras in a B-movie horror flick, about to be killed off by some kind of dangerous science experiment gone rogue. We duct-taped our cuffs and pant legs and strapped on our masks, and the very first thing that happened was I ripped a ten-inch-long hole in the crotch of my protective suit, which I tried to patch with the tape. (It didn’t hold.) The tenant led us to the room with the offending carpet, a burned-out bare bulb in the ceiling and dwindling sunlight filtering through the grimy windows.

“You’ll have to move the mattress out of the way,” she said. “I couldn’t lift it myself.” She pulled the blanket and sheet off her queen-sized bed, and her mattress was wrapped, Christmas-present-style, in a sheet of thick, clear plastic, the kind contractors use for vapour barrier—exactly why, I didn’t want to think about. Mark and I stood the mattress on edge to slide it out the door and out of the room, and as we were lifting it, small black crumbs of something cascaded along the inside of the plastic. When I looked closely, I saw that it was thousands of squirming bedbugs, the vapour-barrier wrap having formed a not-so-well-contained pest terrarium. My gut tightened and I could feel my blood pressure soaring, anxious sirens wailing in my subconscious. I suppressed another gag reflex inside my mask. “Uh, you’ve got some bad bedbugs here,” I said.

“Really?” she said. “The landlord was here last year, and he said he sprayed for them and got rid of them all.” I couldn’t tell if she was sincerely confounded or just trying to play dumb.

“Well, could be he tried, but there’s a lot of them got away. If this was my mattress, I’d take it out and burn it.”

“Well, he told me he got rid of them all,” she said, and went to the kitchen for a cigarette.

Once the mattress was up and out of the room, Mark and I grabbed a loose corner of the carpet and pulled the whole thing up with almost no effort, the decades-old orange glue having almost entirely disintegrated into powder. We rolled it up and slung it under our arms to carry it to the dumpster in the back lane. I was sweating inside my protective suit, and my breath kept fogging up my glasses.

As we were hoisting the roll into the BFI bin, two high school girls came down the alley behind us. “Does that have bedbugs?” one of them asked. I suppose our cheap costumes were a bit of a giveaway: rolled up carpet might have a body stuffed in it, but bedbugs were a more reasonable guess. “Yes, it does,” I said. They both screamed and ran by on the far side of the alley. I felt exactly the same way.

Clearing a Kitchen Drain

My friend Karen lives in a tiny house with her sportswriter husband and a small dog that absolutely loves to bark at me. While most of Karen’s peers worked on career advancement to pay for tropical vacations and kitchen renovations, Karen and her husband poured all the love and effort they could muster into the lives of their kids, leaving the “good enough” house in a make-do state for decades. It’s not fancy, but it’s mostly functional, and now and then when it isn’t, Karen calls me for help.

The kitchen was at one end of the house and the sewer stack at the other end. I’m no plumber and I don’t know the finer points of the latest building codes, but even I could tell that a long, mostly horizontal section of waste-line plumbing was not going to work properly. I went over with my bucket of tools, a recip saw, and a Fernco fitting, my plan being to cut the pipe just before it joined the stack, dislodge whatever had backed up the drain, and patch it all back together with the Fernco. (“Fernco” is a brand name turned generic name for a short section of rubber pipe with a hose clamp on each end that lets you connect two sections of pipe without using glue. “Fernco fittings are the best invention in plumbing since the self-starting siphon,” my tradesman-plumber friend told me. It gives autodidact handymen like me confidence to cut into waste-line plumbing, knowing I can patch it all back together again.)

The basement was 1970s vintage with a few touch-ups and updates, and decades of decorations and memorabilia from travel and work. Photographs, newspaper cut-outs, postcards, posters, maps, prizes, and awards on the walls, as well as the usual basement-storage collection of cardboard boxes, Rubbermaid totes, plastic bags of seasonal clothes, and cartons of Christmas decorations. A big bag of hockey equipment lay on the floor near the spot where I had to cut the pipe, so I took a small red woven rug off the floor and draped it over the bag in case my plumbing job splashed any gunk. The basement ceiling was open and high enough that I didn’t hit my head on the joists, but low enough that I could easily reach the pipes. I spread out a drop cloth and put a five-gallon pail on the floor beneath the spot where I was going to work, and I hauled my big bucket of tools downstairs. My plan was to cut open the farthest end of the pipe and work my way back toward the kitchen drain with a plumbing snake—a twenty-five-foot-long, thin, flexible spring with a spiral hook on one end—to run up the pipe and try to dislodge whatever was blocking it. I used my saw to zip through the two-inch plastic ABS pipe, and a bit of smelly grey water trickled out into the bucket. I pushed the plumbing snake into the foot-long section of pipe that led to the stack—no obstructions—then backed it out and started to run it the other way, toward the kitchen sink.

Now, if by chance you’re a plumber, maybe you’re already wanting to throttle me because I’ve already broken some major plumbing rules and undercut your expertise, and therefore your business, with my reckless, on-the-fly hack job. Plus, you know exactly what comes next. To which I can only say: it’s too late now.

I hadn’t run the snake very far up the waste line when a stream of thick, black slime started running out of the pipe. I used my foot to try to slide my bucket under the stream, but the slime was also trickling down the plumbing snake and dribbling over my hands and running down my arms and my shirt and onto the drop cloth. The sludge wasn’t following anything like a consistent, predictable trajectory. Even the little bit of goo that hit the bucket splashed off the bottom and up and over the edges.

We’re talking some seriously disgusting slime. If the pipe had been installed to drain properly—one inch of slope for every four feet of transverse—I suspect it would have drained properly and not built up so much goo. Who knows. I’m not a plumber. But this was black, viscous, sticky sludge, and it smelled like some kind of exotic, terrifying, non-human excrement. It all came from the kitchen sink, not a toilet, so there is no literal fecal matter here. But years—no, decades—of kitchen-sink waste in a dark, warm, moist environment is a perfect habitat for all kinds of noxious, nasty, foul-smelling microbes. (When I was eighteen, I did just enough research on terrible viruses to make me nervous for the rest of my life, so I’m imagining Ebola again, or maybe cholera. If some of this glop gets splashed in my eye, could I get typhoid? Dengue fever? Might there be malaria lurking in the warm, indoor sludge of Winnipeg?)

Karen came downstairs to see how the work was progressing. “Whatcha got there?” she asked as the goo ran down my forearms and dripped off my elbows. “Hey, nice work,” she said. “I think if I’m reincarnated, I’d like to come back as a kitchen-drain microbe. Think about it: dark, warm, a steady supply of food, and no real predators to speak of.”

“Unless you count me,” I said, though God help us if any of this somehow splashes into my mouth.

Karen went back upstairs, and I attacked the pipe with more vigour, running the snake farther up the line, then pulling it out again. This is how a plumbing snake is supposed to work: run it through the line until it hits an obstacle, then twist the springy snake until the end hooks whatever’s clogged the line, pull the snake back out, and repeat as necessary. Trouble here was that I was working on an overhead pipe, running the snake along a bed of foul, runny slime, so every time I repeated the maneuver, I would drag out another half cup or so of that vile crud that splashed and splattered around the room.

Twenty-five minutes into this process I finally hooked the primary offending glob of accumulated rotten kitchen-scrap leftovers. When I tugged on the snake, the dam broke. The water and sludge and slime and ooze and Drano and kitchen waste and goo all came gushing down the pipe, over my hands, down my arms, onto my sleeves, down my shirt, onto my pants, into my boots. I jumped back to try to dodge the main stream, which was overshooting my carefully placed bucket by more than two feet: a soupy, black, shit-stink waterfall right there in Karen’s basement, splashing off the drop cloth and all over the walls and floor. I pushed the bucket under the flow to catch at least some of the mess. Karen’s husband came downstairs, probably to check out where that godawful smell was coming from. He quietly surveyed the scene, then disappeared and came back with a ratty beach towel, which he draped over his bag of hockey equipment.

“Good call. Sorry,” I said.

“No trouble.”

Once the slop finally stopped flowing, I ran the snake back up the line a few more times to pull out any stray clumps or lumps, then used the Fernco to fasten the pipes back together. I went upstairs to the kitchen and ran the sink for a few minutes to clean out the line and make sure it would drain properly. I rinsed and scrubbed my hands and forearms in the running water, and I used some lemony dish soap to try to get rid of the smell. The sink drained as it ought, but the stink all over me was pernicious. I shut off the faucet, packed up my tools, rolled up my drop cloth, and used the red rug to wipe down the walls that had the worst mess splashed on them and left it in the basement utility sink.

Karen walked me to the front door, her tiny dog growling and barking. Back off, little pooch, I’m fully aware that I’m wafting sewery smells.

“What do I owe you?” she asked.

“Forty-five bucks, plus the Fernco. That’s about fifty.”

“Call it sixty,” she said, and handed me three twenties. “Plumber would have cost double that. Take your kids out for ice cream. Take a shower first though, will you? You stink.”

Where the Sacred Is

Nothing in my formal education qualifies me to work on your house. Sometimes when I do these kinds of jobs, I think to myself: man, these poor suckers have no idea that I have no idea what I’m doing. But that’s not actually right. People hire me to work on their homes because they trust me. I am an honest, trustworthy home-repair guy, and folks pay me to wear grubby, ugly clothes and haul around my tools and help with the everyday problems they inevitably have with their make-do homes. People keep hiring me because I’ve been doing this long enough to troubleshoot a good number of basic problems in these century-old homes, and because I’ve got the audacity to do things like cut open their plumbing and temporarily ruin it so that I can make it work properly again. They hire me because I know what a Fernco is, and where to get it and what size to buy and how to use it.

I used to feel like a ten-year-old and get all glassy-eyed every time I entered the aisles at Home Depot, more or less as a lot of people do, I suppose. I recognized lights and pipes, drywall and lumber, screws and doorhandles, tubs, windows, and tiles, but I had no idea how to make use of them. But in the thirteen years I’ve been at this kind of work, I’ve installed all of those, as well as grommets, Marrettes, bushings, half-inch copper couplings, ABS and PVC, fascia, toggle bolts, corner bead, gaskets, ballasts, thin-set, underlayment, glazing points, mastic, flashing, jambs, sills, strike nails, Tapcon screws, sealant, device boxes, 14/2 and BX, setting compound, PL premium, HardieBacker, ring nails, hemlock drip cap, grout, vapour barrier, expansion foam, composite shims, sanitary tees, P-traps, and air admittance valves. I’ve used all of those, and I know where to find them and when to use them, all that and the kitchen sink. A bunch of kitchen sinks, in fact. I am not an expert at anything, but I know enough that a lot of the people who hire me know they can call me to do the kinds of jobs they do not want to do on their own, like pulling apart a kitchen drain and getting stinky slop all down your arms.

My friend Alan tells me I could make way more money if I specialized, but part of what keeps me doing this work is the sheer variety of tasks. I’ve gutted and remodelled a dozen bathrooms, remodelled kitchens, installed vast expanses of tile, and painted acres of wall. I’ve built tree houses, bookshelves, bed frames, decks, desks, porch steps, a dining-room table, fences, storm windows, a giant swinging barn door, and two coffins, one for my father-in-law, one for an infant. I’m afraid specializing would take the fun out of it, make me a bit more money but make me hate my job, and if you hate your job, you hate your life. If I have to choose between the stress of financial insecurity or the depression of tedious, numbing boredom, I’ll take the stress any day.

I relish the obvious pleasures of being a body as much as the next guy: a vigorous back massage, a summertime nap in a hammock, middle-aged lovemaking, a satisfying meal of chipotle pork, Mexican rice pilaf, shredded Jack cheese, diced tomatoes, and homemade guacamole. But no less embodied are washing the dishes after the meal is over, taking out the trash, and the series of bathroom visits that transpire after a meal of rich, spicy food. I have spent most of my life doing work that requires me to use my whole body, not just eyeballs and a clicking finger. And I have come to learn that manual labour can be good work, that skilled labour is not mindless, that exhausting work can be deeply satisfying, and that even a stinky, slimy, grimy, smeary, nasty job can be a locus of the sacred.