So it sees the light of day

The world being what it is, the Talk of the Town, that Independent on Sunday supplement I wrote a couple of things for, is headed for the tubes. Here's a piece that was supposed to be in it some time around now. It is, I'm sorry, about the sewers, but I'm sure this is the end of it:

There’s always sewer work in New York. Some of the sewers are nearly 150 hundred years old, and with the ground under the city heaving with workmen, digging machines, telephone lines and water pipes, sometimes they collapse. Other times, the city tries to get to them before that.

Last Wednesday I went to see some sewer repairs with Sam Bailey, a business agent for the Timbermen, the union for carpenters who work on sewer jobs. We drove through Brooklyn and Queens, stopping every other block it seemed, to see broken pipes and old manholes.

On the sidewalks there were piles of smashed, muddy pipe-pieces and down in the earth and the seepage there were broken off pipe-mouths: the cracked old bits of a monstrous system.

There are more than 6,300 miles of sewers in New York: big ones, brick ones, small ones, clay ones. If you were a rat and you laid them out end to end and crawled into them, you could go from New York to Alaska and back.

We went to a job in Queens, in a quiet suburban neighbourhood called White Plains. There was snow in the gardens and the sky was high, blue and crackling cold. Victor Carames, the foreman, was replacing an old pipe which ran under the sidewalk, with a new, deeper one to run under the road.

Victor was Spanish with bright blue eyes and the job seemed too small for him. It was only a little sewer he was laying. A big yellow excavator had dug a trench outside a modest bungalow, and with its great claw was nudging carefully around the tiny half-inch pipe that carried water into the house. The owner of the bungalow kept drifting nervously over to see the work, Victor kept driving him away.

Keen to show us more, Victor led us away from the job and had a manhole opened in the middle of a crossroads. Below “NYC Sewer” the manhole cover said “Made in China.” Twenty feet down, a brown, pummelling slick of liquid was rushing along in the gloom.

“A river down there! Down inside the pipe, picking it up, all the water for everywhere, into this motherfucker, you watch that…,” said Victor falling silent, gazing in.

“I dig this kind of pipe eleven years ago, 40 feet down…” said Victor, as we walked back to the site, “It was a gorgeous job, a gorgeous job.”

Around the trench, as the digger heaved and flipped out old sections of dead pipe and rolled them along the road, Victor was the conductor. Over the noise of machinery and saws, he whistled in blasts to his workers. Every time Victor whistled, they paused for a moment (“It means… ‘What I do wrong?’” He explained), corrected themselves and carried on.

Victor’s other trick was his right hand. With a cigarette dangling in his mouth and his gloves in his back pocket despite the gnawing cold, he made constant gestures to Carlos, the digger operator.

Victor’s hand was the digger’s claw: he closed it when he wanted mud picked up and he moved it to the left or the right to guide Carlos through the tightest moments. When the claw was in the trench and Carlos could not see it, all its movements were based on Victor’s hand, nudging ever so gently, inches at a time. When the claw was out of the hole, Victor would yell “Go Carlos! Go!” and Carlos would relax, swing the machine around, dump his load and then smash it down on the frozen asphalt to break up the street for the next section of the trench.

Twelve feet down in the hole, which was shored up by planks of timber and forced outwards by braces, the mud was orange and brown. Through the boards, the bungalow was leaking its fluids. It looked soapy. Maybe the owner had given up trying to oversee the work and was having a shower. A red laser spot helped show the gradient of the trench and it played on our trousers as we crossed its beam. Victor was quieter in the trench.

“Oh yeah, you find a lot of shit down here,” he said, by no means punning, “We find cars, we got trucks buried, big boulders...”

Elsewhere that day we heard other stories of sewer finds. No ninja turtles unfortunately, nor Catholic priests like Father Fairing in Thomas Pynchon’s V, but more mundane, domestic losses. According to one foreman, Greenpoint’s sewers, in Brooklyn, are good for old doorknobs. Otherwise, there is a steady stream of gold and silver spoons, coins and hubcaps.

After telling the story of a big boulder he once found, Victor climbed out of the hole. On the surface he was the conductor again, always moving, whistling, shouting to his labourers (“Amerio, Amerio…a little wider huh?”) before stopping for a moment to warm his hands over a jerrycan and its fire of leftover wood.

An hour later it was time to go, there were plenty more jobs for Sam Bailey to inspect. Victor showed us to the car and as he shook our hands in the road a white New York bus came up behind him. It missed by inches and he saw me flinch.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “they don’t touch me.”