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11 | (continued) The place looked and smelled terrible. The kids had clearly ignored the third of three instructions: dig a pit, use it, then fill it in. They may have felt some revulsion over the last command, since many of them had missed the hole (it does take practice). That experience made me resolve never to excavate the landscape for the sake of my bodily functions. But of course the natural consequence of such a policy is the slow spread of a very unsanitary patch of ground. Though the patch was less than a hundred feet from the tent, I very seldom caught its odor. But the slope of the land also allowed my fecal bacteria to be washed down into the river during heavy rains. I regret both of these failures, and I certainly don’t intend to repeat them, but at the time, I didn’t appreciate the impact of my presence there, and I had many other things on my mind.
In connection with this ecological dilemma, I’ve just finished reading Kathleen Meyers’ How to Shit in the Woods. Given the forthright title, I was hoping the contents would be helpful, but I’m afraid they’re not—quite the contrary. Never in my life did I imagine that I would someday be advised, with exquisitely detailed instructions, to bring my poop out of the wild, back to civilization, where it can be disposed of in a “proper” manner, lest I pass on some of my gastrointestinal microbes to some other presumably unsuspecting creature, whether of my own species or not. I can’t help wondering what Ms. Meyers thought was the normal course of events before she wrote her book. I too am very concerned over the proliferation of giardiasis (beaver fever), to say nothing of greater evils.
In other words, it takes a little poop to get the system going. Once your digestive tract is ticking over, you can afford to be more fastidious. Of course I filter my drinking water if I can’t get it from a spring, and so should everyone else. But it isn’t the droppings of Homo sapiens that I fear— beyond the confines of inhabited areas, human shit is rarer than uranium in this country. The deposits of all the other species of forest animals, which Meyers carefully enumerates in her opening passage, outweigh ours by an enormous margin. She neglects to mention the millions of pounds of ungulate manure spread over millions of acres of farmland every year on this continent. This would seem to fully justify the greatest care in treating your drinking water, but it’s downright silly, in the face of this ratio, to heap the greatest responsibility upon the smallest contributors, by admonishing campers to load their backpacks with their own reeking turds as they wend their way home. Who the hell would ever look forward to a vacation in the wild with this prospect in mind? All of which suggests to me a far more accurate title for her book: How NOT to Shit in the Woods, which lets us reduce the entire text to a single stiff imperative: “Stay out of them,” a command that I would heartily address to Ms. Meyers and her followers.
One small innovation along these lines that I’m still rather proud of was the sealed chamber-bottle, in which I could relieve my bladder without getting out of the tent. Its luxury was actually grander than that: I could piss into it without even getting out of the sleeping-bag, since I never zipped it up. The chamber-bottle was simply a wide-mouthed, 1.5-liter (imitation) orange juice jug, with top, and I could easily use it by turning on my side and drawing it under the flap of the bag. In this decadent age of push-button lethargy, I am surprised that such simple, cost-effective, labor-saving devices are not in more widespread use. (I’m not surprised that Ms. Meyers never gets around to describing a receptacle that’s of use only to men.) |
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But Ms. Meyers seems to be totally unaware that animals of all species have been imbibing each other’s fecal bacteria for millions of years, every time they took a drink from virtually any fresh-water body on earth. How does she think these creatures |
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