It all began when I learned that the house we were buying was on a septic tank system (we're far enough out in the boonies that there is no city water or sewage). I asked the seller when it had last been cleaned out, and he had no idea what I was talking about. He'd lived here for 15 years, and didn't know that septic tanks needed to be cleaned out once in a while. Oh, my.
It's a big septic tank – 1,000 gallons – and there were just the couple and the wife's mother living here. Still ... 15 years is a long time. Furthermore, the septic tank wasn't cleaned when he bought the place – so it's entirely possible that the septic tank has never been cleaned (the house was built in 1992). So I figured that I better get that taken care of, sooner rather than later – before something really awful happened :)
So I made a call to a local fellow who pumps septic tanks, and I discovered that here, unlike in San Diego, the tank pumpers don't normally dig out the tank's lid. That little problem was mine, all mine.
Now a real manly man, the kind with actual muscles and such, might well see this as a trivial digging problem. Me? Not trivial at all. Doable, but it's not the kind of thing I do very often. Dang.
So I found the septic system inspection map (the county health department made me a copy of it for free), and measured out where the septic tank's lid was supposed to be. I knew it might be as much as two feet under, but that's really all I knew. I wasn't sure the map was all that accurate, either, so I wouldn't have been surprised if the lid was several feet away from where the map said it was – which would, of course, mean much more digging.
I dug. Down I went, through about 6 inches of beautiful black loam, very easy to dig in. Then I hit something else altogether – a layer of gray clay, wet and dense, with the consistency of a flour and glue mixture. That wasn't quite so easy to dig through!
At just over 18 inches, I hit the rebar handle of the lid – within an inch of the point I'd measured. At 20 inches, I hit the top of the concrete lid. At 22 inches, I hit the top of the concrete pipe the lid is sitting on. An hour and a half after starting, I had the lid fully exposed.
Now my arms are burning from the exertion, and after sitting for 15 minutes, I've caught my breath again. That was probably good for me (or at least, people will tell me that), but it sure doesn't feel like it right now :)