Vermin are no urban myth

Did you know that 57 times last year, people in Seattle called to report they'd found a rat in the toilet?

I always figured this for an urban myth. It seems too horror-show to be true: Your most private, vulnerable moment, shattered by a wriggling beast from below.

Yet it happens once a week around here. It's common enough that the government now produces a map called "Seattle Rat in the Toilet Complaints." (From the looks of this map, which shows a fluorescent green dot for each place a rat popped up in the porcelain, north of the Ship Canal is our new "Rat City.")

When Stokley Towles saw this map hanging near the cubicle of a Seattle Public Utilities worker, at first he couldn't believe it, either.

Then he thought: Isn't it intriguing, in this age of technology and automation, that we're still engaged in the medieval-sounding pursuit of sewer rats.

So it goes throughout "Waterlines," an eclectic, one-man theater project Towles is staging in a trailer at Seattle's Volunteer Park. It's part performance art, part exhibition about Seattle's water system and the pipes and policies that deliver it to your tap.

But it really seems to be about obsession.

Towles, who lives in Seattle, used a $15,000 grant from the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs to spend six months exploring the city's water and sewer facilities. He interviewed 80 to 100 employees there — engineers, chemists, sewer technicians, limnologists (which, he learned, is someone who studies bodies of freshwater).

What he found, besides troves of biological and historical tidbits about water, is a group of workers almost religiously preoccupied with things most of us never give a thought to.

"This water — it's no small thing in their lives," Towles says.

There's an engineer who lies awake when it rains, listening for a certain sound patter that may indicate a trouble spot near Northgate is on the verge of flooding.

There's a guy named Mel who has walked through most of Seattle's sewer pipes. (Yes — walked. Through working sewers.)

Then there are the tasters. Workers whose taste buds are so sharp they can discern subtle changes in water chemistry before instruments can. So they go around sampling the water by drinking it (at the Lake Youngs reservoir near Maple Valley, the water can have hints of beet, cucumber or geranium, depending on the algae content and the season.)

Towles says they're so concerned about taste that they made the city's pipe suppliers do similar taste-testing at their factories (so our water doesn't acquire flavors of concrete or steel).

Is this normal? Towles called the owner of one supplier, in Alabama, to ask. The owner said he ships pipes to cities in all 50 states. Only one has ever asked for a pipe taste test.

"Some may say it's overkill, but I found it reassuring that people here are that passionate about the water," Towles says. "It's a beautiful thing — we have this network of dams and reservoirs and pipes, controlled by computers, and what really matters in the end is something human like taste."

Towles has made a career of this notion that there are no small things. He once spent a year studying the curious habits of the patrons and staff of the Seattle Public Library. (Example: A book got returned with a raw strip of bacon inside as a bookmark.)

In 2004, he embedded with Seattle cops, producing "Bright Lines: A Police Report." It was about the effects of dealing with criminals on the officers' private lives.

Next up: Garbage. Some sort of anthropological dig into Seattle's fixation with its trash.

The point of all this is to tell stories about ourselves. About some of our most seemingly run-of-the-mill stuff. How it really works. Who is consumed by it.

"Maybe hearing these stories will change how you think about your water," Towles said. "Maybe even how you use it."

It has worked on me. I'm now scared to use the toilet.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.