Squatter's Rites | Appendix

Appendix: Winter Gear | (continued)

The potency of sodium hypochlorite, of which household bleach is typically a 5% solution, is easy to underestimate until you get a mouthful of such a mixture as mine, as I did once or twice when brushing my teeth. All I was trying to do was save my precious drinking water. I swear I can still taste that horrific concoction, at least in memory—I could literally taste it for hours after I spewed it out. The fault was clearly mine, since chlorine is entirely suitable for such a purpose (provided you don’t drink the goddamned stuff—tap water in most cities is mildly carcinogenic). I was treating the river water as though it were raw sewage, which in reality it did not approach; its greatest threat, summer or winter, would probably have been small quantities of fecal bacteria from upstream farms.

So how much is enough? Obviously, it depends on the degree of microbial contamination in the available water, since mild disinfectants can only rid water of protozoans—one-celled micro-organisms—not always the larger, multicellular creatures. And of course it will have no effect on the excreta of industry: suspended or dissolved minerals such as PCBs, dioxins, lead, asbestos or mercury.

The latter pollutants are not a problem (in their usual concentrations) if you only plan to bathe with the water, but the protozoans known as giardia lamblia, the cause of beaver fever, which is potentially fatal, and which can be contracted by the intake of a single organism, will require a considerably higher dose of chlorine than normal concentrations of fecal bacteria or general fresh-water microbiota, both animal and vegetable.

If I suggest a mixture of one half-cup of bleach to five gallons of water, it sounds like a pretty weak solution. I can only recommend that you prepare a potion of equivalent ratio (1:40) and give it a taste—just a taste, mind you, not a sip. Your tongue will immediately inform you that no microorganisms, whether animal, vegetable or viral, could possibly survive in the stuff, and further, that it will impart a strong odor of chlorine to everything it touches.

If the water you’re using is relatively clean in the first place, you can do with a far milder mixture, but you must not forget that you can and will ingest pathogens in considerable numbers, if they are present, merely in the process of bathing (or swimming) in untreated water; anti-bacterial soap is always a help, but you will have to rinse it off, so your bathwater must still be disinfected.

One authority on the Internet (a State Public Health Department in the U.S.) advises that sufficient chlorination for giardia lamblia would require nine drops of bleach per imperial gallon, or two drops per liter. This is to be stirred and allowed to stand for 30 minutes. It seems a bit mild to me, but they may be thinking of water which is otherwise unpolluted, a rare commodity nowadays. Either that or they’re really talking about drinking water, which I have not yet mentioned, but on which subject I have only one recommendation: ceramic filtration. Visit your nearest camping equipment store and ask them about ceramic filters for drinking water—don’t let them sell you anything else. The micropores of a ceramic filter can trap everything but actual viral particles, and these will normally be clinging to objects much larger than themselves, thus being filterable in any case.

If you’re not a chemist, yet you feel that you must have an ultra-compact source of chlorine for your bathwater, swimming-pool supply stores carry products, in both liquid and powder form, with many times the strength of household bleach. Always handle such substances with extreme care and follow the instructions on the package religiously; don’t forget that they do their job only because they’re toxic.

I’ve never yet used a water-quality test kit, but the idea appealed to me, for both hygienic and scientific reasons, but I don’t think I don’t think I’ll be doing any serious water testing in the near future. It seems that the meaningful analysis of water, in its natural habitat or elsewhere, is definitely not an amateur undertaking any more. Certain tests can be made with portable equipment, but these are very basic, and no one would be interested in your results, except maybe your kids.

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