Now I don’t want to say that working at a resort the first summer wasn’t all I dreamed it would be, but: Where were the girls in bikinis? When do we go water-skiing? Why hasn’t the nepotism kicked in?
Such dark thoughts filled my head as I sloshed in high, black rubber boots through fetid waters collecting on the surface of the lodge’s open-air septic system, twelve red tile sewer pipes emptying into a forty-by-forty-foot sandbox known as the Chili Pond.
The theory of sanitation engineering and sciences behind this system was that noxious fluids would flow down from the headwaters, or commodes, seep in and flow through the sand until the saturation point was reached and the contaminated waters could seep no more. The theory posited that somehow in all this flowing and seeping the water would somehow be purified. You take the first sip.
The discharge, about the shade of stout English breakfast tea, would begin collecting on the surface and the warm summer sunshine would bring out the rich, full-bodied aroma.
Who you gonna call? The Septic Solutions Squad. Us: Two of the lowliest on the organizational chart, two with the least time of service, were issued rubber boots and armed with shovels to churn the sands, for what our straw boss, Jim Murphy, called “a day at the beach.” Funny guy, that Jim. It was always two guys—the buddy system—in case one was overcome.
“Look!” shouted John, my partner, hoisting something that looked like a six-inch translucent version of a boot dangling on the end of his shovel. A gift from the sea.
“Hold it up to your ear,” I replied, “and you can hear the sound of flushing.”
Today, the Chili Pond would probably be declared a Superfund site, crawling with EPA crews in haz-mat suits. (Disregard this remark if we don’t have an EPA anymore.)
Just as Jim called this “a day at the beach,” so too did he refer to swinging a long-handled weed cutter back and forth for hours on the back hill “practicing your golf swing.” That Jim. He had a million of ’em.
John was a friend from home, who joined me at the lodge my first summer, envisioning the same bikinis and ski boats I did. His mom came several weeks early to pick him up after too much sun ’n’ fun in the Chili Pond, weed wacking, and spending most of his meager salary on jumbo bottles of calamine lotion.
He let out a yell one morning as we were cutting on the back hill when he came upon a big black snake. I couldn’t stand snakes and lived in fear every time we cut weeds from then on. We didn’t really have snakes in Champaign, just the very rare short, skinny green “garden snake” not much bigger than a worm. Even today I prefer an urban environment where all the world’s concrete and you can see what lies ahead even if it’s a mugger.
(Here’s how I feel about snakes: In Vietnam, when our base camp was under nightly rocket attacks, everyone slept in a sandbagged bunker except me. I’d seen a snake slithering out of the bunker and never went back. I knew then that I would rather die than see a snake.)
There were also special projects, such as diving into the lake to force empty fifty-five-gallon drums under Ed’s dock for added flotation. The barrels had been previously filled with gelatinous creosote, a toxic substance now banned in many states. Pete and I were covered with the stuff. When purple and red patches broke out all over our bodies, Jim thoughtfully washed us down with gasoline.
In the afternoons, we’d collect dirty laundry from the linen closets, wrap it in bundles twice our size then stagger under their enormous weight to the pickup bins on the She Shack porch.