fish tale
When it got to the part of the move where we carried the aquarium out to the truck, my brother Ben seemed nervous. He was stalling, obviously not excited about the last significant part of this move. For new readers to this column, I’ll remind you that this is the same brother who I’ve seen sprinting down a residential street in the nude on a dare, and the same brother who I once caught making out with two girls he didn’t know at a party… three minutes after we arrived. There isn’t much in the world that makes him nervous.
Ben reminded me that 55 gallons of water weighs well over 400 lbs, and it’s a delicate balance between dropping the water level to reduce weight and keeping enough water in there to save his prized fish. Plus, it’s a huge glass box, so it naturally wants to shatter into seven million pieces.
The move had been perfect so far. I’m used to showing up to help people move where I’m the only helper and the person has nothing packed. Usually I’m the one developing hernias dragging somebody’s junk out to my truck while the owner scrambles to throw stuff in boxes, or just now remembers they need to get the key for the new place, or chooses that moment to struggle to get his or her life in order. But not Ben – he and his fiancée were the perfect movers, with everything packed and ready to go. All we had left was this bigass aquarium.
The official recommended method to moving a aquarium is to leave the water a little bit dirty for the weeks leading up to the move. This preserves the natural bacteria in the water and helps reduce shock later when you refill the tank at the new place. But it also means that this gigantic and delicate glass box smells exactly like the dumpster at a seafood restaurant.
I gave all kinds of false reassurances — which I’m prone to do — and convinced Ben that we could do this, even though I internally gave it a pretty high chance of exploding somehow. He siphoned the first half off the top of the tank into buckets while I ferried them out to be dumped on the grass – that way the whole neighborhood could enjoy the smell. While we lowered the tank level, the fish swam around and looked confused.
“Something seems weird in here. Is our ceiling dropping?”
“You’re such a conspiracy nut, Larry. I don’t believe anything you say.”
“I’m serious – look how small our room looks.”
“Larry, I want a divorce.”
Our test lift was an embarrassing attempt – the aquarium still weighed a ton. We realized that we were going to have to drop the level to right about the height of the fish and hope they didn’t flip out (literally). As Ben went to siphon again, I stood there leaning on the tube like a big dummy, accidentally pinching it off. So when he inhaled to draw the air through the tube a second time, he didn’t realize there was still a large amount of water in there… and he inhaled a mouthful of that nasty, nasty liquid.
I wasn’t sure what to expect in this aquarium move beforehand, but I did not picture my brother puking and retching in his kitchen sink while I laughed maniacally.
“See what you did, Larry? Look how upset Ben is.”
We eventually moved the fish over to the new place in an ice chest, with a hasty transfer of fish on the shoulder of the road. I tried to balance driving quickly to limit their transport time, while also maneuvering the crazy drivers in Austin, and inching delicately over bumps to avoid cracking the big fragile aquarium. But when we took our first turn, the nasty fish water splashed out of the ice chest and drenched Ben’s shirt.
As of the time of this report, all the fish made it. And Ben brushed his teeth.