The Dirt Whisperer, by Rod A. White
Photo by John Cheatem
My Uncle Vern could read dirt like other people read newspapers. Not in some mystical, earth-connection way either. He just spent so much time covered in it that he developed what Mom called “an unholy intimacy with filth.”
Vern ran a septic tank business in rural Nebraska called Your Crap Is Our Concern, which he thought was the height of entrepreneurial wit. The logo featured a smiling turd wearing a top hat. His competitors, Stool Bus and The Poop Troop, had classier names, but Vern said class was for people who didn’t spend forty hours a week elbow-deep in other people’s digested pot roast.
I started working for him the summer I turned sixteen, mostly because Dad said if I wanted to keep “sitting on my ass playing video games,” I needed to understand what real work felt like. Vern picked me up at 5:00 a.m. on my first day. His truck smelled like a possum had died in a Porta-Potty. He handed me a pair of rubber overalls that were stiff with dried god-knows-what.
“Don’t worry,” he said, grinning with his three remaining front teeth. “That’s mostly mud.”
I begged to differ. It was not mostly mud.
My first call was at the Hendricks’s farmhouse, where Mrs. Hendricks met us in her driveway with a handkerchief pressed to her nose and fear in her eyes. “It’s backing up into the shower,” she gasped. “There’s … corn.”
Vern nodded sagely. “There’s always corn.”
He had me drag the hose from the truck while he surveyed the septic lid like a general preparing for battle. When he finally popped it open, the smell that emerged wasn’t just a smell―it was a physical entity, a malevolent spirit that grabbed you by the nostrils and dragged you into its hell. I gagged so hard I nearly brought up the gas station burrito I’d eaten on the way over.
“Breathe through your mouth,” Vern advised.
“That’s worse! Now I can taste it!”
“Yeah, but you get used to the taste faster than the smell.”
This was the kind of wisdom they don’t teach you in school.
As Vern fed the hose down into the tank, he started narrating what he was finding like he was hosting a nature documentary exploring the Mariana Trench. “Oh yeah, there’s your problem right here. Someone’s been flushing baby wipes. See that layer? That’s what we call the wipe reef. Builds up over time and creates a dam of dookie.”
Mrs. Hendricks retreated inside, but Mr. Hendricks stood on the porch, hands on his hips, nodding along like Vern was explaining crop rotation.
“And down here,” Vern said, “we got what I call the archaeological layers. Every flush tells a story. You can see they had Mexican food on Monday, which is your bean sediment over there…”
Mr. Hendricks interrupted with the tone of a lawyer defending a case, “That’d be Mexican Monday. He is correct.”
Vern continued, “And it looks like someone had a real good time with some sweet corn, probably Thursday or Friday. The human digestive system is a time machine, boy. Everything that goes in must come out, and when it does, it arrives in perfect chronological order.”
I scuttled off to dry-heave behind the truck, but Vern was in his element, practically rhapsodizing about the fossilized turds and meals of the past. The worst part wasn’t the smell or the sight of what human bodies produce, it was the intimacy of it all. Standing in someone’s yard, staring into their septic tank, you learned things about them they’d never volunteer to disclose. The Hendrickses clearly ate a lot of fiber. They also had a fondness for those flushable wipes that are absolutely not flushable, no matter what the package claims.
“People think they’re being clean,” Vern said, while working the hose deeper. “But really, they’re just creating a shit-berg. It’s the Titanic down here, except instead of ice, it’s compressed baby wipes cemented by layers and layers of turds.”
By week two, I’d developed what Vern called “the thousand-yard stare,” which was the vacant, haunted look of someone who’d seen too much gore. I pumped tanks for a hoarder whose toilet situation suggested they’d been using it as a garbage disposal. I cleaned out a tank for a college sorority house that had a full-sized teddy bear in it. A teddy bear. Vern didn’t even question it. “People flush weird shit,” he said, which felt like a literal truth.
But the job that broke me, and I mean really, truly broke me, was at the Keller place.
The Kellers ran a small bed and breakfast, one of those “charming country getaways” advertised on websites with too many curlicue fonts. They called Vern in a panic because their system had backed up during a full-house weekend, and they had eight guests and one bathroom currently burping onto the tile floor.
When we arrived, Mrs. Keller was standing in the yard, literally wringing her hands like a cartoon character. “The guests are in the living room,” she whispered. “They can’t know about this. Can you be … discreet?”
Vern glanced at his truck emblazoned with the smiling turd logo and the words YOUR CRAP IS OUR CONCERN in two-foot-tall letters and said, “Sure thing, ma’am.”
The septic tank was, naturally, located directly beneath the dining room window, where all eight guests had moved to enjoy complimentary muffins and coffee. It wasn’t the smartest deflective move by Mrs. Keller. As soon as Vern popped the lid, I watched their faces change in sequence, like a wave at a baseball game, but instead of joy, they were expressing horror and disgust.
One elderly woman dropped her muffin. A man in a polo shirt stood up so fast he knocked over his chair. Two younger women fled the room with their hands over their mouths.
And the smell―dear God, the smell. This wasn’t your standard septic funk. This was something aggressive, something that had evolved beyond normal decay into a new form of olfactory warfare. This was what happened when eight strangers with eight different digestive systems and dietary intakes all used the same bathroom for three days straight.
“Oh boy,” Vern breathed as he peered into the tank. “Now that’s what I call a party.”
He made me hold the flashlight while he investigated. In the beam of light, I could see layers of material that looked less like waste and more like the core sample from some cursed geological survey in a horror movie. Vern started pointing things out with his gloved finger.
“See that? That’s definitely someone’s lactose intolerance making an appearance. And over here, we got evidence of what I call ‘vacation constipation,’ which translates into someone waiting too long, and when it finally happened, it happened hard. That’s gonna need the industrial hose.”
The industrial hose was kept in a special locked box on the truck, like Excalibur, but for fighting evil that came out of buttholes. Vern only used it for “the big jobs,” which I’d learned were situations where regular equipment would simply surrender.
As we worked―and by “we,” I mean Vern worked while I stood there contemplating my life choices―the guests started sneaking to the window. They couldn’t help themselves. Human nature demands that we look at the forbidden and bear witness to the horrible. One by one, they returned, faces pressed against the glass and noses covered with hands, watching Vern wage war against the combined digestive output of their weekend getaway.
Mrs. Keller kept bringing out various flavors of muffins, as if carbs could somehow compensate for the fact that we were essentially performing an autopsy on her guests’ collective bowel movements while they watched.
“Blueberry?” she offered weakly as Vern pulled up what appeared to be a hairball the size of a terrier.
“Jesus Christ!” one guest exclaimed, loud enough that we could hear it through the pane of glass. “Is that … hair?”
“Oh yeah,” Vern called back with a cheesy smile. “People shed like dogs. It all goes down the drain and ends up here. This is probably two, three months of shower hair. Plus, some beard trimmings, looks like.” He held it up to the light like a jeweler examining a precious diamond. “You can tell a lot about a person from their septic tank. This here tells me you got at least one longhaired lady living here, probably brunette, although it’s hard to tell in the goo, and maybe using a coconut-based shampoo, based on the texture.”
Mrs. Keller went pale. The guests were even paler.
But Vern was just getting started. Once he got rolling on septic philosophy, there was no stopping him. “People think civilization is about what we build up,” he announced to his captive audience of horrified bed-and-breakfast guests. “But really, it’s about what we bury. Every culture in history has had to figure out what to do with their shit. Romans had sewers. Medieval folks used chamber pots. We got these here tanks. In a thousand years, archaeologists are gonna dig these up and learn everything about us. Our diets, our medications, our internal secrets.”
One of the young women fled again. The man in the polo had his phone out, either taking pictures or texting his therapist. It was hard to tell from my angle.
Vern continued, “You know what the difference is between a good person and a bad person? Nothing. Because we all shit the same. Don’t matter if you’re a CEO or a janitor, you’re producing the same basic product. That’s equality, boy. That’s the great leveler. You can lie about a lot of things in life, but you can’t lie about what’s in your septic tank.”
I had stopped dry-heaving by this point, having achieved a state of Zen acceptance. This was my life now. I was the apprentice to a sewer philosopher, a toilet prophet, a septic sage.
We finished the job around noon, by which time the bed and breakfast had emptied out entirely. All eight guests somehow found urgent reasons to check out early. Mrs. Keller paid in cash, her hand shaking as she counted out the bills. She added a bonus under the condition we swore never to speak of this to anyone.
“Discretion is my middle name,” Vern assured her, as he climbed into his shit mobile with its giant cartoon turd mascot.
On the drive back to the shop, covered in filth and reeking of humanity’s darkest secrets, Vern turned to me and said, “You did good today, kid. Takes a special kind of person to do this work.”
“Special as in ‘talented,’ or special as in ‘needs professional help’?”
He offered me a beaming, three-toothed grin and said, “Yes.”
I worked for Vern the rest of the summer and the next two after that. By the time I graduated high school, I could identify the problem with a septic system just from the smell. I could tell you if someone had been on antibiotics, if they’d recently eaten spicy food, if they were secretly lactose intolerant, but in denial of it. I knew the difference between regular waste and “someone had Taco Bell for days straight” waste. I became fluent in the language of filth.
My friends couldn’t understand why I kept taking the job. The money was okay, but not amazing. The hours were brutal. The work was literally shit. But here’s what they didn’t get―there was something oddly honest about it. In a world full of fake Instagram lives and carefully curated personas, septic tanks don’t lie. They’re the great truth tellers, the keepers of secrets, the repositories of what we all pretend doesn’t happen.
Plus, it gave me the best college essay topic anyone in my graduating class could claim. “What I Learned Working in Septic Systems” got me into three state schools and one private liberal arts college. The admissions officer at the latter actually called me to say it was the most memorable essay she’d read in fifteen years.
Uncle Vern retired last year. He sold the business to a guy from Omaha who immediately changed the name to Reliable Septic Solutions and got rid of the smiling turd logo. The new guy wears clean coveralls and talks about “waste management” instead of shit. He doesn’t read dirt or philosophize about the great equalizer like Vern did. He just pumps tanks and moves on.
But sometimes, when I’m home visiting, I’ll drive past the old Keller place, which is shut down now, the B&B dream abandoned, and I’ll remember that day. I’ll remember Vern holding up that hairball like Simba, the horrified guests pressed against the window, Mrs. Keller offering muffins, and the smell. God, the smell.
Then, I’ll think: that was real. That was honest. That was dirt in every possible meaning of the word. The literal filth, the uncomfortable truth, the grimy underbelly of civilized life that we all participate in but pretend doesn’t exist.
Other people’s crap was Uncle Vern’s concern. And for three summers, it was mine, too.
And you know what? I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything. Even if they do occasionally make me gag.
Rod A. White has operated a full-time writing/ghostwriting/editing business since 2010, providing articles, blog posts, ebooks, books, and other writing services to a global clientele. Rod entered semi-retirement in 2025, allowing him more time to pursue his passion of writing and art in the form of short stories, novels, screenplays, comic books, graphic novels, illustrations, etc. He has published a supernatural romance novel titled Reflections of a Ruby Pendant, has published numerous short stories, and has won several awards for his short stories and poetry. Rod’s stories have recently been accepted for publication by Vellum Mortis, Flash Point SF, Crimson Quill Press, Dragon Soul Press, Plott Hound, Inkd Publishing, Havok, and Wolfsinger.