The Maple Sent $3,200 of Roots Into My Sewer Line

Thirty-four feet from my cleanout, at the depth of a shovel handle lying flat, my sewer line showed up on a monitor as a white knot the size of a fist, and a rooter tech named Cam turned the screen toward me the way a golf pro shows you a bad lie. It was 10:05 in the mornin'. February 3. The monitor sat on a cart in my driveway in Portland, and the knot was five feet from the decorative gravel strip I had raked the Sunday before.

the gurgle i chose to ignore

The backup had announced itself a week early and I had ignored it perfectly. January 27. The guest toilet gurgled when the dishwasher drained. I ran the dishwasher again to watch, which is not a diagnosis. I even drove to the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne and stood in the plumbing aisle holding a $14 jug of Rooto crystals, read the part of the label about clay pipe, and put it back on the shelf. That is the single smartest thing I did in January. It was downhill from there.

february second, 6:50 p.m.

Then the floor drain in the basement let go at 6:50 on a Monday night, forty minutes into our daughter's 12th-birthday dinner, with 11 guests upstairs and the cake already cut. Sewage came up quiet and steady thru the drain by the laundry hookups, and by 7:30 we had towels, a shop vac, and a house rule that nobody downstairs looked down. The guests left by 8:30. The birthday girl ate her cake Monday out of the fridge, standing up, and I spent Tuesday on hold with every plumber inside the city limits. Blue Line Rooter could come Saturday. Saturday rates.

thirty-four feet, one white knot

Here is the bill that built, line by line, because this is how I had to carry it. Saturday call-out: $940. Cable thru the line: included, 45 minutes, one root ball shredded at 34 feet. Jetting at 4,000 psi the following Wednesday: $1,290, and what came back up the cleanout was gray and stringy and about the color of the carpet in my worst dream. Camera scope: $215. RootX foam treatment: $295. Second opinion from Bonilla Plumbing to confirm the line has no belly and no break: $460. Total: $3,200. The scope footage is 19 minutes long and I have watched all of it twice.

what the camera kept returning to

The map on the scope read like a history of my street. Clay pipe from 1948, hub joints every three feet, and roots entering at the joints like they had a key, which roots do, cuz a hub joint gap is a key. At 38 feet the camera found the tap, the fitting where my lateral meets the city main under the street, and past the tap the picture went public. My problem lived entirely on the private side. The problem's address, to be exact, was the root plate of the silver maple in my parking strip, 60 feet of shade, planted by the city sometime before the Nixon administration.

the permit counter on fourth avenue

The maple is a street tree, which means Portland Urban Forestry owns it and I rake after it. I called first and got a case number, 26-04187, and a phone answer I did not trust, so I drove to the counter at 1900 SW Fourth Avenue and asked a clerk named Renata in person. She laid it out without notes. The city owns the tree. The homeowner owns the lateral, from the house to the main, tap included. No compensation, ever, for root damage from a street tree. Touching street tree roots requires a root-pruning permit, $87, with an arborist sign-off. I asked her who pays for my $3,200. She said, and I wrote it down in the truck after: "The tree belongs to the city. The pipe belongs to you."

rootx once a year

So the arrangement runs like this. Blue Line comes annually now, $145, to renew the foam in the joints, cuz RootX kills roots on contact and the label promises a year of clear pipe. Every second winter I pay $215 for a scope and watch my own sewer on a monitor like a hobbyist. The total cost of keeping the maple is running about $300 a year, which beats removing it by a distance, because a 60-foot silver maple on a south-facing lot knocked approximately $40 a month off my PGE summers and a removal permit plus crane plus stump would run me five figures for a tree I would miss by the first July heat wave.

the maple stays

The line scoped clean again on May 8, thirty-one feet of open clay and one hub joint freshly dosed with foam, and Cam walked the whole pass on the monitor like a nature documentary host. Cam's monitor still plays in my head: 34 feet, one white knot, my name on an invoice under the city's tree. $87 keeps me legal to prune its roots. $145 a year keeps the joints dosed. The maple stays. That is the whole arrangement.