The COVID pandemic brought one unexpected but appreciated change to our lives at home. When you’re not out among your fellowman as often or as closely, you might quickly drift into a less frequent bathing regimen. You’re more on a self-sniff schedule in setting those bathing parameters, with a little help from your partner.

And, gradually, so was born the Beringian bi-weekly cleansing ritual we call Cleanhoggin. That’s about how often we need to do laundry now, and we make it a point to go whole hog. While we usually bathe our bodies more often, we don’t go crazy with that either. Every Cleanhoggin Day, normally every other Saturday, we take on the task with gusto, doing laundry, taking a sauna, showering, and maybe even shaving and cutting nails (a real spa day).

One of the unexpected downsides of this is that drain traps can dry out with less frequent use. So we periodically get nasty gasping sewer belches into the house. It occurs most frequently with the laundry drain, often giving Cleanhoggin its own special aroma. But last week the entire garage erupted with a miasmic gasp from the very devil’s asshole. (I suppose for the faint of heart we could call it an unpleasant emittance.)

This had the smell of thousands of dollars of something really bad happening. I quickly got down on my hands and knees and put my snout to the floor drain, but the smell didn’t seem any stronger or weaker from there. My mind went next to where the really expensive damage was more likely to have occurred—the crawl space under the house where all the drainage runs. You enter it through the garage, and it’s a big hole perfect for devilish vapor emissions.

I put on my rubber boots, grabbed a light, and took the plunge. The air immediately smelled much better, so my heart lifted and I stopped going through a mental rolodex of who to call for this on a weekend. Given our experience with the laundry trap, I guessed it must be the garage floor drain after all. I filled a five-gallon bucket with warm water, pried the drain grille up, and poured the water down while muttering incantations and wishing for luck. I’m happy to say that the issue was quenched, the devil departed, our air became sweet again, and the downtrodden rejoiced at the close of a particularly successful Cleanhoggin.

The Silent Highwayman (from Wikimedia Commons)

An early Italian version of Cleanhoggin