Little House on the Prairie (Not)

Right now I'm reading 2 books on early Iowa history. It seemed timely to reread Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie as a break from the less-than-luminous prose of professional historians and anthropologists. The whole set comes through the house at least once a year and probably deserves a post of their own, 'though it might tell you more about me (and maybe Deep Springs indirectly) than Iowa: I thought the Indians coming in the house wearing fresh skunk skins and eating everything was actually really funny--surely the Indians did that on purpose, and probably on a bet.

But all this pioneering narrative makes me remember coming to Iowa myself, and exactly the sort of topic Mrs. Wilder never mentioned. That's right, the outhouse.

In the late summer of '06 I moved into rural Iowa. How rural? The photo on my header was the view over the kitchen sink.

My husband commuted and I was home with little kids. There was corn and soybeans as far as the eye could see; most farms are more than a thousand acres, so farmhouses were few. There were two hog operations just out of sight.

Now, I'm not really country, but I've lived in the country enough to be concerned about moving into a house that hadn't been lived in for a few years. But we were assured by the landlord that the septic system was fine. It was built in the 1960s, a brick house with a big basement, reasonably tight for the winter. It had a few quirks--striped carpet in the kitchen, an Austin Powers carpeted bathroom--but a nice little house for us while our house in Michigan waited to sell. The pavement ended just past us. Winter came early.

And then one day I went into the basement to do laundry....But between me and the washer and dryer was a lake some 18 feet across that could only have one origin: the big drain in the middle of the basement floor. The landlord came out and located the top of the septic, which was buried under the snow, by sighting from the eaves. A man came in a tank truck and pumped the septic tank into his truck, checked with me that the basement had drained, and left. All hunky dory. Just a lot of disinfecting to do downstairs.

But a week or so later, it wasn't hunky dory. The lake was back. Further investigation by the experts revealed that the leach field was dead and would have to be dug and replaced in about six months. The ground was frozen and we were without septic until it thawed: two adults, a baby just starting to walk, a preschooler still in diapers, and our personal hygiene, laundry, cooking and dishes. So we conserved water in a major way, and every week or ten days I'd have the following phone conversation with our landlord:

Me: Hi, Bob. It's Foodie. We've got water downstairs again.

Bob: Okay, I'll call the guy. 'Bye.

Then the next day, or Monday if this unfortunately happened on Friday, two guys in overalls with a portable pump would drive around back, pump out the tank and shoot the septic water out onto the snow over the leach field.

Seven months later the ground thawed and a bobcat, backhoe, large bladed tractor, and a dump truck full of gravel arrived to dig and replace the leach field all in one day. For my 4 yr. old boy it was like Christmas! Real diggers came to our house! And that's all he remembers about the situation.

Let's review that winter: outside, the smell of two big hog farms and months of pumped out sewage water. In the house, 2 kids in diapers and super low water use. In the basement, regular sewage floods. They only saw other children (sometimes) when we drove in to the county library. But if he describes to you the 14 months we spent there, he says something like this:

We lived out in (Not on Any Map) a while. There was a big blizzard on my birthday and there was a snow drift all the way up the front door. Daddy had to dig a valley out to take the dog out. It was really windy all the time so we couldn't have picnics, but there were a whole lot of fireflies, like the stars fell down to dance around above the soybean plants. The computer was really slow and I couldn't download big Lego instructions. And then one day lots of diggers came to our house. They dug a big hole and a dump truck dumped a bunch of gravel but then they covered it up. We moved on my sister's birthday but that was okay because there wasn't anybody to invite to a party but Grandma came and we had lunch with her at a restaurant while Daddy and his Dad did the moving truck.