> SOUTHERN INDIANA — If you live anywhere long enough, eventually you’ll find yourself confronted with plumbing problems. I think war is the only proper metaphor for plumbing issues, since they usually begin with a sneak attack, they require vast expenditures of money and in my case they often involve the shedding of blood.

When I was a child, our kitchen drain was my father’s Waterloo, so to speak. I remember him excavating a large area under our porch and then having to trench across our entire backyard in relentless pursuit of the supposed tree roots that kept stopping up the line. Worst of all, no matter what he did, or how much money he spent, the problem never seemed completely resolved — the kitchen sink still kept getting clogged.

Never one to seek professional help, except in life and death situations, my father also personally installed a toilet and shower in our basement. To simplify the plumbing involved the toilet ended up positioned directly under the shower — a rather unfortunate arrangement.

Plumbing disasters apparently run in our family. Shortly after my older brother bought his first new house, something went drastically wrong and the basement was suddenly flooded with more than three feet of standing water. After trying everything to rid himself of his unwanted indoor pool, he finally solved this plumbing problem permanently — by moving.

Years later when my wife Diane and I bought our first house, we were only there a few months before we were confronted with the “The Great Thanksgiving Clog of 1979.” This tragedy not only deprived us of working toilets on Thanksgiving weekend, it also cruelly depleted all of the Christmas money we had just received from relatives. Up until that time, I had thought of “Roto-Rooter” as a punch line to some joke. This situation, however, was no laughing matter. When a regular electric plumber’s snake didn’t make a dent in the problem, the Roto-Rooter man, deployed another, much larger and more sophisticated device. It looked like he was drilling for oil on our front lawn with some sort of a tactical nuclear weapon.

I was to later discover that the slope of line that went from our house to the main sewer, in the middle of the cul-de-sac where we lived, was not steep enough. Consequently the line was frequently clogged. One day I came home early and found the line blocked again and opened up the large manhole, across the street where I could get access to the main line. I climbed in the manhole along with our children, who were helping me try to snake out the pipe, when Diane drove up, arriving home from work. She said she was a bit surprised, because she never expected to see her entire family laying in a sewer.

I have always admired people who are skilled at things I cannot begin to do, like plumbing. Plumbing itself is an ancient and honorable profession. The word “plumber” is derived from the Latin word in Roman times for lead, “plumbum.” In medieval times anyone who worked with the lead was called a plumber. Since lead was extensively used for piping, baths and roof conduits and drains, the term gradually acquired its modern meaning.

I once read that plumbers make more money than brain surgeons. While this is not true, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average plumber’s annual salary is about $52,000 per year and those at the top end of the scale can have take-home pay in the six-figure range. Plumber training programs typically take four to five years to complete, about the same time as a doctoral degree.

When we came to Indiana we bought an older house and I suppose you have to expect occasional plumbing difficulties. A few years ago, our water bill suddenly increased by about $50 a month. We didn’t know what had caused this until about a week later, when I was walking in the front yard and started to sink into the ground. I dug down a couple of feet in the marshy soil and found a broken connection in the main water line into the house. We were lucky enough to find a local plumber who fixed the broken pipe in short order, at a reasonable price. This started not long after we had a minor earthquake which I still think might have caused the connection to break.

Last weekend we noticed some leaking coming from our upstairs bathroom and Diane said I should try to re-caulk the bathtub. This is just the sort of task that fills me with trepidation. It is the kind of a job I know that I should be able to do, but I also know I could just as easily make a shambles of it. To try to get some idea of how I should proceed, I watched three different YouTube videos. It’s funny how the Internet has taken the place of asking other people how to do something. The British video was the best, although it was hard to understand the accent at times and they called the caulk gun “a silicone sealant gun.” It all looked so easy. It would obviously take a complete “git” to mess up such a straight forward job.

Of course, it wasn’t nearly as easy as it looked. In the video the old caulk easily came off in a single strip, while I had to scrape for more than an hour to get most of it off in tiny bits and pieces, making quite a mess. I also was not very steady in applying the new caulk and when I ran my finger over it to smooth it down, I managed to get caulk all over the walls, as well as myself. It took a lot of scrubbing and cleaning to get everything to look acceptable. The tub does look brighter with the new caulk, but whether or not it stops the leak remains to be seen.

People, like my father, often claim that they were afraid of being overcharged by plumbers, however, in several national surveys, asking people which are the most trusted professions, plumbers usually fall precisely in the middle of the pack. Medical personnel like nurses, druggists and doctors are usually at the top of the list while lobbyists and used car salesmen are at the bottom. Plumbers typically rank just above newspaper writers in trustworthiness. The next time I’m worried that a plumber might overcharge me, I should probably remember that the plumber is more likely to be worried that I won’t pay him.

— Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring the local community mental health center in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com. Checkout his Welcome to Planet-Terry blog and podcast at www.planetterry.wordpress.com.