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The only noteworthy cemetery story I can offer is that once a couple of us were farmed out by the guy we worked for to dig sprinkler line ditches for a couples of days out in the Los Osos Cemetery. Fine with us, it was a change from crawling under mobile homes with the spiders and gas leaks or slogging paint on some termite colony while perched on a flimsy ladder, hoping you won't fall to your painful and sudden retirement from gravity's inevitable taxes, weighing your odds against your mirage of riches that a cash job pays, cursing and praying as the tenant's dog runs wildly around the base of the cracked wooden deathtrap, barking and pacing like a frantic Scotsman at a pay toilet. By comparison, outside, in a calm, grassy setting with a nice view of the hills, digging in the soft, sandy soil of Los Osos sounded like an easy vacation.

It had rained for three days, but not very hard, and it had stopped at least two days earlier. The sun shown through scattered clouds, and although not warm, it wasn't cold at all. Just enough to keep from overheating while we were chewing up dirt with the shovel. We figured we'd mark it, pull a strip of grass and lay it to the side to replace when we were done, dig the trench 2 foot deep by 8 inches wide (the size of the trencher shovel), lay 70-100 feet at a time, pressure test it, bury it, throw on the grass, and be done. We had a little under 800 feet, plus heads, valves, & tees (and a timer/brain) and had be done in under a month. Even at another 5 an hour, I couldn't see how it could possible take two of us a month to finish, no matter how much I'd want to milk the hours. Its a two week job, tops.

First day we spent a lot of the morning walking through the grounds with the grounds keeper going over where exactly they wanted the water to cover and where the water mains where and most important WHERE NOT TO DIG! Now I really thought I payed close attention to that, because I had to draw where all the sprinklers went and where the pipes ran from and even where the power for the little sprinkler brain and where the wires were going to run underground to the valves. I know I made a little map/diagram in my notebook to show me where I was supposed to be because I found it later, and it turned out that that was NOT where we were digging.

For some reason, loved ones throw a hissy fit when you dig a trench through their dead buddy's grave, even for something as innocuous as a sprinkler line. I mean, Christ, it wasn't a sewer pipe or an oil well or an atomic waste dump. Let's get a little perspective, here. We didn't interrupt a burial, nor did we prevent a resurrection. One of us may have, on a natural post lunch ale expression of decompression, left a small quantity of used beverage in the earth at the bottom of the excavation. In all fairness, this was on the fourth or fifth day, by which time we had not only discovered the only restroom facilities were in the burial office with creepy, pale, clammy guys in suits and weird death paraphernalia (and therefor had decided that there was no way for all the ice cream & circus monkeys you could fit in a dump truck would were go up covered with mud and sweat and ask them to allow us to drop our trousers, point a puckered gaze, and bark our peasant corruption into their flawless white death potty) but by then we had fallen into our rhythm, and had the valve headstock assembled next to the water main and ready to hook up, but we had the better part of the upper 300 feet laid, tested, and buried. We were starting on the lower, older section when the trouble started.

Now I know I drew a map (because I still had it, and I looked), and I could have sworn that we were in just the right spot between two rows of graves. It was hard to tell, because the old stones had shifted, and many were covered up by sand and grass. Of course, it had been nearly a week since it was pointed out to us from the top of the hill by a guy who was just about ready for lunch. We had also had at least one beer with (for) lunch since the first day, when we figured out that nobody wants to talk to the labor. Add in the greenbud, and along comes our familiar companions, memory loss & incorrect conclusions. Digging a two foot trench across a grave isn't the reason for this story. It's just something I remembered while I was getting to the point.

It rained one more day over the week end. When we came back on Monday to start digging in the right spot, since it was in the low part of the cemetery and the soil was nice and sandy, as soon as we got below 6 inches, we started to seepage into the trench. It wasn't bad enough that we had to dig another foot and a half deeper in muddy sand that kept collapsing. We had to dig the trench two and a half feet wide to get it deep enough because the side kept falling in. But that wasn't the worst part.

The water that was seeping into the trench, and into our boots, and soaking up our pant legs and running down our sleeves with every shovelful; That water had run through the graves uphill from us, leeching the essence of each rotting corpse like some obscene tea bag, to finally fill our ditch like a punchbowl for cursed souls and ghouls. The smell was unlike anything I've ever smelled. Worse than a dead beached whale. More powerful than a freshly cracked septic tank. And it stayed....and stuck to my clothes, my skin, my tools......for weeks!

Like giving DumbSkull analingus, only without the lumps.