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My earlier odoriferous episode on the subject of Loft Life was of course a mere variation on a theme, and since we’re all junior ecologists now, you must know that I have no choice but to deal with the matter in greater detail. In the present context, the question resolves itself to the simplest form: when you’re camped in the woods for nine months, what do you do with your poop? I can see now that I didn’t handle that problem as well as I should have. The first few times I left my calling-card in a woods of any kind, I walked away and abandoned it where it fell, toilet paper and all (when I had any); more than once I’ve had to use a wet rag or a few handfuls of snow. But gradually my eco-ethics began to improve, and I took to clearing a patch of litter from the soil, then using the litter to conceal the evidence completely. My reasoning was both esthetic and “scientific:” left in this way, my deposit was both minimally visible and maximally biodegradable. What more, I thought, could one ask? In warm weather, the ever-present hordes of microbiota should polish it off in a week or so, right? Wrong. When I returned to my second campsite eighteen months after I was evicted, my scats, it appeared, were gone, or at least not visible. The search was brief, but nothing caught my eye, or my nose. Yet the numerous swatches of toilet paper I had left behind were still easy to spot and in tolerably good condition. I was close to being astounded by this finding. Eighteen months? What the hell was wrong with all the little creatures whose very living is to devour this stuff? Are they on a hunger strike? Not exactly, I later realized—just chilled to the bone, or nucleus, whatever. And for good reason. I now know that on the floor of a mature, temperate forest, there is no such thing as warm weather. Even during an unusual heat spell, the temperature of the soil beneath well-shaded litter is seldom going to rise above 60° F, and its average will be well below that. Consider the circumstances and you’ll quickly see why: since warm air rises above cool air, where would the expected heat come from? Certainly not from sunlight— nearly all of its radiant heat is absorbed by the canopy of the trees. Nor from the earth itself in any great amount—concentrations of geothermal energy are found only in volcanoes and hot springs; its average supply to an acre of ordinary ground is very slight—easily dissipated by radiation and local winds. So it happens that fallen organic matter decomposes very slowly in such a place, even in the summer. In winter, the rate of this breakdown drops to near zero. And bleached paper does not compare, for sheer nutritional content, to the droppings of a large omnivore in the first place. In fact, the bleaching process reduces the biodegradability of the paper by a significant margin. Future measures to remedy this fact will have to include adding some nutrient compounds to the pulp during manufacture—literally feeding the microbiota, or at least enticing them to clean up after us. My environmental practice therefore appears exceedingly naïve. It was based on beliefs I had never tested, but simply took to be self-evident. It seems obvious now that I should have dug a good-sized latrine pit of at least three cubic feet and gradually backfilled it. But of course even this careful habit is unworkable in winter—loosening frozen soil requires a pick, which Boss didn’t have and I wouldn’t buy. I’ve only read two books on winter camping. My memory is far from perfect, but I cannot recall either of them mentioning this subject. In retrospect, this doesn’t surprise me; most books on camping techniques leave so much out they’re near to worthless; I must look elsewhere. My reluctance to dig holes in the ground for this purpose was the result of a sad spectacle of neglect that I saw in 1978 near a fine campsite on St. Nora Lake in the Haliburtons. By the last light of dusk, I had made my way to a likely stand of saplings, tissue in hand, only to find that the little copse was not as pristine as it looked from a distance. Earlier that summer, a rather large group of apparently young campers had spent the night, and left behind a small field of narrow craters, dug with a garden trowel, so numerous and so close together that I was afraid I would twist an ankle if I wasn’t careful where I walked. |
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