I was taking a shower a week or so ago when it happened: the tub stopped draining. Since I was only rinsing off from a workout, the shower hadn't been that long and so the backup was puzzling. I was concerned, but not overly, so I just went out to the local grocery, bought clog remover, poured a generous sample down the drain and then rinsed as directed a few minutes later. A little while after this, I flushed the toilet. The toilet didn't really flush, rather it weakly exchanged a bit of its water and then overflowed. I scrambled around, threw extra towels on the floor to keep the water from running from the bathroom into the rest of the house and tried that whole pour/rinse/repeat cycle described on the bottle of the clog remover (all of these industrial cleansers, by the way, claim they are safe for use on all drains--including toilets).

Nothing has been the same since that first day of pour/rinse/repeat. My roommate and I have poured a few gallons of clog remover down the respective drains, used some overnight foaming cleanser and everything is just getting worse. Yesterday, drainage from another part of the house (until then the drainage problem only affected the bathroom drains), the washing machine to be specific, began to pour into the bathtub. For some reason, everything ends up in the bathtub. When the toilet overflows and I use the plunger, and the tub accepts the backflow. A few inches of dirty water and sludge backs up and sets up camp for a few minutes before draining again to somewhere else.

I'm beginning to think there is a real problem here. The strangeness of it all is that there wasn't really any difficulty at all until that first fateful day of backwash. There was no warning. No slow draining tub, no toilet refusing to get rid of its refuse. Once the sink in the kitchen got backed up, I used the plunger there and found that a chopstick had gotten lodged (and collected lots of rotten clingy friends) in the sink drain. After the chopstick came out, everything was fine.

About five years ago, in a different house, we had a backed up sewer that would dump refuse on the side of the house. The landlord-ess, a woman I only saw twice in my life (once when we signed the lease and put down first/last/deposit, and once on the day we moved in), was not the most user friendly person in the world. She ignored all of our calls over a two or three month period until one Sunday when she finally understood our frantic situation. She got a roto-rooter guy to come and snake the drain. I'm beginning to think snaking the drain might be our only recourse. What I thought was only a temporary back up has turned into a full-blown drama of "where will the crappy water back up to next?"

It's gotten to the point where I don't trust any toilet to work correctly on its own anymore. I expect every single one I use to give me a little trouble. The toilets at work, the ones in the bar, my friend's toilets, every toilet in the world.

Interestingly, there have been similar problems lately in town. I personally blame the weather. It's been very hot and humid (for this part of the country) the last three or four weeks. Every once in a while it rains, but mostly it just gets hot and sticky. This has necessitated cool off showers and extra consumption of fluids--compounding the hot and stickyness of drains area-round.

Just a couple of days ago, 400,000 to 500,000 gallons of raw sewage "accidentally" got dumped into the Rio Grande here in Albuquerque. Someone hit the wrong switch ("mechanical failure" was the official explanation). Either that or the sewage plant itself backed up. No one is allowed to swim, fish or even look at the river for the next week or so. And many places that use Rio Grande water for various things have had to stop. And the EPA has gotten emergency funding to help people in western Albuquerque (about 4000 homes) who have leaking septic tanks.

I think it's a good time to be a roto-rooter guy. This kind of stuff never happens in the winter.

But for today, well, I've got a few loads of laundry to do. And so far, each load has thrown back a nice batch of what waste officials like to call "gray water" into the tub. My economy-sized Liquid Plumr is working overtime.

Not that I really dream about being a frontier man all the time, but there is a bit of beauty to walking to your favorite corner of the forest and fertilizing it the old fashioned way. Sure it'd be a whole day's job to wash clothes and taking a shower isn't really in the cards, but neither is the tell-tale bubble bubble bubble from a drain that has set itself on permanent reverse.

Matt Worley is also aware that there was no lottery back in the frontier times, but there was beer, so it's kind of a trade off.