SprinKlers II: Revenge of the Silt

So, coal, oil, and other flourocarbonates are formed usually in highly biotic ares where a biomass is buried and sealed in silt creating an anoxic environment. The overall rotting of the microbial sized to large sized organisms without aerobic respiration occuring will, over time, solidify into the carbon-rich stuff that powers cars and furnaces.

The reason I bring this up is because silt, locked in a hydrated area, forms a very anoxic environment. That means everything under the immediate ground smells just like a cow backed up to a hot stove and left a biological deposit. I know this intimately because of recent activities of digging in the bottom of a pond. As has been pointed out, someone charged my employer for sprinklers buried in a pond. I don't see why they need pressurized water flowing into the bottom of a pond, but I'm not king turd of shit mountain in this situation. I am but a low-paid student. I had to find the sprinklers using a shovel and my hands.

I found most of them and dug them out while kneeling down in the stagnate pond water and moving the conreted silt mud around. I found them one by one and flagged them. I figured that sooner or later, somebody would come out and take care of these little plastic problems.

The next day, one of my bosses came in and said, "Hey, thanks for finding all them sprinklers. What we now is for you to go out and dig them up back to the main."

I did as I was told.

As I was standing knee deep in the water that smelled of foul port-o-potty, I cut around the sprinklers with my shovel and moved the grassy soil off to the side. I dug to the base of the sprinkler and hoped to find a calcium white joint of PVC underneath it. I did not. I found a cheap rubber hose leading farther down into the muck. I dug and dug, unearthing more of the fossil of wasted fiscal rescource. The hole I was digging kept requiring expansion as I dug deeper and deeper into the future coal. I was angry. Angry and smelly.

A shadow crossed the muck. One of my bosses, designer extraordinaire of this system, was standing over me on the edge of the pond.

"Did ya find it?"

"No, it's got a CPVC swing arm on it. I got to dig farther down, but I've already crossed three pipes it doesn't connect to."

"Yeah, I hate them swing arms. Never can tell where they go. That one'll be deep since it goes to a frost line."

"A frost line? Why would they consider an irrigation pipe frost line? It get's blown out in the fall and the soil's dry."

"Well, yeah, but they had to bury it deeper since it's under a pond."

"So, you knew this was a pond when they put sprinklers down here?"

"Yeah. The water could freeze around the pipe and break it if it's up where the ground gets saturated."

"Bill?"

"Yeah?"

"Let me get this straight, you went to all this extra work to keep the sprinkler lines from freezing under a pond?"

"Uh huh."

"If this is a pond, why are there sprinklers here in the first fucking place?"

"To water the grass."

"The pond grass that's under the pond water?"

He looks at me as if I am a slow student. "Yeah."

I dug deeper into the silt and black sludge.