Return to Camp, 2013 — The Poop Pipe and More

You gotta figure that having a 100 year-old farm house for Deer and Turkey Camp would have consequences, some of them unforeseen. You also have to figure that being away from a house for 3 months– things are going to change. I came back to camp Friday night after being gone since the close of Rifle Season last December. Yes, there had been changes and some of them were not good.

For one thing, the wind had pealed a section of metal roof off the curing shed. That will be pretty easy to fix. The next discovery was not so easy. The front door was stuck. I mean REALLY stuck. The house had shifted over the winter and the keeper for the front door lock was a good 1/4 inch higher. That had so discombobulated the lock that I could not get the handle to turn. The keeper was toast. Saturday morning, I took the door off its hinges and that freed things up. I dug out the keeper and remounted the door. There are multiple bars, etc to keep the front door from opening when we’re not there. This was just a minor inconvenience, but still. . .

A Bucket of Mice

I have finally found a way to keep the mice from causing havoc over the winter. In the past, I put out lots of D-Con and prayed. That usually left me with a lot of D-Con hidden in my hunting boots, and the smell of dead mice coming from unreachable spots all over the house. This year, I found the solution.

I took a 5 gallon bucket, a piece of coat hanger and a plastic lid and made a handy makeshift mouse trap. The bucket had 6 inches of water in it along with enough anti-freeze to keep it from icing up. The coat hanger acted as the pivot point for the plastic lid, which held a big smear of peanut butter for bait. I used a board as a ramp up to the top of the bucket. When the mice went for the bait, they would make the plate pivot and they would fall into the water and drown. All this took less than 15 minutes to fabricate, but I managed to score a half-dozen mice over the three months I was gone.

The Poop Pipe

Now for the big news, the poop pipe. I had spent the winter ruminating over what to do. Back during Deer Season, I found the end of the poop pipe had gone dry. It was all going somewhere, just not out the end of the pipe. This promised to be a challenging weekend. I had visions of a great underground chasm filled with sewage and fears that while I slept the ground would open up beneath me and Deer Camp would fall into the abyss.

The poop pipe runs out the back of the house , and used to end about 10 yards away , just at the fenceline. When I got the place, I thought it was a bit short for my taste, so I ran a 100 ft length of corrugated drain pipe on top of the ground off the end out into the pasture. At the end of season, I went out to move the end of the pipe, and there was no pile of solids out at the end. The other end was bone dry too. Inside the house, everything was working okay. so I figured the break was in that 10 yard run. It’s clay pipe, and it is shallow, and I can see where the grass was growing a bit greener despite the drought this past summer. That is where I intended to dig.

The funny thing is that we had almost an entire year’s worth of sewage just disappear. It didn’t burble up in the yard, it did not come back in the house. It did not come out the other end. It just . . . went somewhere. I tried running a lot of water down the pipe, but nothing showed up.

Saturday morning, I went out to the back and drank a couple cups of coffee, listened to the turkeys and then went back in and waited for things to warm up past freezing, ate breakfast and then went back out. It was just #3 son, Angus, and I working on it. Moose, #2 son, the plumber in the family had stayed home. He could guess what was ahead and wimped out. It did not take long to find the trouble. There was only about 10 yards of buried clay pipe. It was mostly less than 6 inches under the ground. Flushing was forming a soupy spot about halfway down.

4 hours later, I laid down for a nap. Behind me lay a pile of impacted ceramic pipe sections. We temporarily pulled the corrugated pipe up close to the house and attached it just so we could continue flushing while we get the job done. Next steps will be digging the trench a foot or so deeper, laying new PVC pipe and then burying it. I should have everything done before the end of turkey season.

Ah! The challenges of having a 100 year old deer camp.

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