Review
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“Kathleen Meyer has contributed to
environmental awareness while lending a grand old English word
the respectability it hasn’t had since Chaucer’s day.”
--FRANK GRAHAM, Audubon magazine
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About the Author
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A longtime outdoorswoman, KATHLEEN MEYER is the founding editor
of Headwaters, published by Friends of the River. Her travel
essays have been included in the Travelers’ Tales anthologies A
Woman’s Passion for Travel: More True Stories from a Woman’s
World and Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women
Write from the Road. Her adventure memoir Barefoot Hearted: A
Wild Life Among Wildlife was released by Villard in 2001.
Whitewater rafter and canoeist, sea-kayaker and sailor, she is
also a draft horse teamster, having traversed three Rocky
ain states by horse-drawn wagon. Ever the nontraditional
spirit, Meyer resides in an old, rather unrestored, dairy barn in
Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and is available for interviews.
Visit her Website www.KathleenintheWoods.net and hop onto her
blog Shooting the Shit
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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1 Anatomy of a Crap
Bowels are not exactly a polite subject for conversation, but
they are certainly a common problem. . . . Please think of me
again as the urologist’s daughter. . . . It may disgust you that
I have brought it up at all, but who knows? Life has some
problems which are basic for all of us--and about which we have a
natural reticence.
--Katherine Hepburn, The Making of The African Queen
In the mid-1800s, in the Royal Borough of Chelsea, London, an
industrious young English plumber named Thomas Crapper grabbed
Progress in his pipe wrench and with a number of sophisticated
sanitation inventions leapfrogged ahead one hundred years. T. J.
Crapper found himself challenged by problems we wrestle with yet
today: water quality and water conservation. Faced with London’s
diminishing reservoirs, drained almost dry by the valve leakage
and “continuous flush systems” of early water closets, Crapper
developed the water waste preventer--the very siphonic cistern
with uphill flow and automatic shut-off found in modern toilet
tanks. T. Crapper & Co Ld, Sanitary Engineers, Marlboro Works,
Chelsea (as his name still appears on three manhole covers in
Westminster Abbey) was also responsible for the laying of
hundreds of miles of London’s connecting sewers--and none too
soon. The River Thames carried such quantities of rotting turds
that the effluvium had driven Parliament to convene in the early
morning hours to avoid a vile off-river breeze.
For the Victorian ladies who complained of the WC’s hissing and
gurgling as giving away their elaborately disguised trips to the
loo, Crapper installed the first silencers. Such pretenses as
“pricking the plum pudding” or “picking the daisies” were foiled
when a lady’s absence was accompanied by cing waterfalls and
echoing burbles. Among Mr. Crapper’s other cls to fame were
his pear-shaped toilet seat (the forerunner of the gap-front
seat) designed for men, and the posthumous addition to the
English language of a vibrant new word: crapper!
Clearly, T. J. Crapper was ahead of his day. Progress and time,
nonetheless, are peculiar concepts. Some things in the
universe--, the use of euphemisms, sneaking off to the
bathroom to tinkle silently down the side of the , to name a
few--seem to defy change, even from century to century. But
there’s been one glaring reversal in regard to crap. Our advanced
twenty-first-century populace, well removed from the novelties
and quirks of the first indoor WCs, finds itself having to break
entirely new ground, as it were, when relieving itself outdoors.
Ironically, shitting in the woods successfully--that is, without
adverse environmental, psychological, or physical
consequences--might be deemed genuine progress today. Take Henry,
for instance (a namesake, perhaps, or even a descendant of old
King Henry VIII).
All the stories you are about to read are true (for the most
part), having been extracted from dear friends and voluble
strangers on various occasions, sometimes following the ingestion
of copious quantities of Jose Cuervo or Yukon Jack. Only the
names have been changed to protect the incommodious.
High on a dusty epment jutting skyward from camp, a man named
Henry, having scrambled up there and squeezed in behind what
appeared to be the ideal bush for camoue, began lowering
himself precariously into a deep knee bend. Far below, just out
of their bedrolls, three fellow river runners violated the
profound quiet of the canyon’s first light by poking about the
commissary, cracking eggs, snapping twigs, and sloshing out the
coffee pot. Through the branches, our pretzel man on the hill
observed the breakfast preparations while proceeding with his own
morning mission. To the earth it finally fell, round and firm,
this sturdy turd. With a bit more encouragement from gravity, it
rolled slowly out from between Henry’s big boots, threaded its
way through the spindly trunks of the “ideal” bush, and then
truly taking on a mind of its own, leaped into the air like a
downhill skier out at the gate.
You can see the dust trail of a fast-moving pickup mushrooming
off a dirt road long after you’ve lost of the truck. Henry
watched, wide-eyed and helpless, as a similar if smaller cloud
billowed up defiantly below him, and the actual item became
obscured from view. Zigging and zagging, it caromed off rough
spots in the terrain. Madly it bumped and tumbled and dropped, as
though making its run through a giant pinball machine. Gaining
momentum, gathering its own little avalanche, round and down it
spun like a buried back tire spraying up sand. All too fast it
raced down the steep slope--until it became locked into that
deadly slow motion common to the fleeting seconds just preceding
all imminent, unalterable disasters. With one last bounce, one
final effort at heavenward orbit, this unruly goof ball (followed
by an arcing tail of debris) landed in a terminal thud and a rain
of pebbly clatter not six inches from the bare foot of the woman
measuring out coffee.
With his dignity thus unraveled along sixty yards of descent,
Henry in all likelihood might have come home from his first river
trip firmly resolved to never again set foot past the end of the
asphalt. Of course, left to his own devices and with any
determination at all unless he was a total fumble-bum, Henry
would have learned how to shit in the woods. Eventually. The
refining of his skills by trial and error and the acquiring of
grace, poise, and self-confidence--not to mention muscle
development and balance--would probably have taken him about as
long as it did me: years.
I don’t think Henry would mind our taking a closer look at his
calamity. Henry can teach us a lot, and not all by poor example.
Indeed, he started out on the right track by getting far enough
away from camp to ensure his privacy. Straight up just wasn’t the
best choice of direction. Next, he chose a location with a view,
although whether he took time to appreciate it is unknown.
Usually I recommend a wide-reaching view, a landscape rolling
away to distant ain peaks and broad expanses of wild sky.
But a close-in setting near a lichen-covered rock, a single
wildflower, or even dried-up weeds and monotonous talus, when
quietly studied, can offer inspiration of a different brand.
The more time you spend in the wild, the easier it will be to
reconnoiter an inspiring view. A friend of mine calls her morning
exercise the Advanced Wilderness Appreciation Walk. As she
strides along an irrigation canal practically devoid of
vegetation, but overgrown with crumpled cans, has-been
appliances, and rusted auto parts, she finds the morning’s joy in
the colors of the sunrise and the backlighting of a lone thistle.
Essential for the outdoor neophyte is a breathtaking view. These
rtunities for glorious moments alone in the presence of
grandeur should be soaked up. They are soul replenishing and mind
expanding. The ideal occasion for communing with nature is while
you’re peacefully sitting still--yes, shitting in the woods. The
rest of the day, unless you’re trekking solo, can quickly become
cluttered with social or organizational distractions.
But back to Henry, whose only major mistake was failing to dig a
hole. It’s something to think about: a small hole preventing the
complete destruction of an ego. A proper hole is of great
importance, not only in averting disasters such as Henry’s, but
in preventing the spread of disease and facilitating rapid
decomposition. Chapter 2 in its entirety is devoted to the hole.
More do’s and don’ts for preserving mental and physical
while shitting in the woods will become apparent as we look in on
Charles. He has his own notion about clothes and pooping in the
wilderness: he takes them off. Needless to say, this man hikes
well away from camp and any connecting trails to a place where he
feels secure about completely removing his britches and relaxing
for a spell. Finding an ant-free log, he digs his hole on the
site side from the view, sits down, scoots to the back of the
log, and floats into the rhapsody that tall treetops find in the
clouds. Remember this one. It’s by far the dreamiest, most
relaxing setup for shitting in the woods. A smooth,
bread-loaf-shaped rock (or even your backpack in a pinch in a
vacant wasteland) can be used in the same manner--for hanging
your buns over the back.
This seems like an appropriate spot to share a helpful technique
imparted to me one day by another friend: “Shit first, dig
later.” In puzzlement, I turned to her and as our eyes met she
watched mine grow into harvest moons. But of course, “shit first,
dig later”--that way you could never miss the hole. It was the
perfect solution! Perfect, that is, for anyone with bad . Me?
Not me.
Unlike Charles, there’s my longtime friend Elizabeth who prizes
the usefulness of her clothes. While on a rattletrap bus trip
through northern Mexico, the lumbering vehicle on which she rode
came to a five-minute halt to compensate for the lack of a toilet
on board. Like a colorful parachute descending from desert skies,
Lizzie’s voluminous skirt billowed to the earth, and she squatted
down inside her own private outhouse.
Occasionally it is impossible to obtain an optimal degree of
privacy. Some years back, my colleague Henrietta Alice was
hitchhiking along the Autobahn in Germany, where the terrain was
board flat and barren. At last, unable to contain herself, she
asked the driver to stop and she struck out across a field toward
a knoll topped by a lone bush. There, hidden by branches and
feeling safe from the eyes of traffic, she squatted and swung up
the back of her skirt, securing it as a cape over her head. But
Henrietta’s rejoicing ended abruptly. Out of nowhere came a
column of Boy Guides (the rear guard?) marching past her bare
derrière.
Another version of Henrietta’s story needs to be kept in mind
when hiking switchbacks. I was all settled once, well off the
path, completely shrouded with low-hanging branches, pants down,
a soft mullein leaf in hand, when smack at me came three hikers,
all men, stepping smartly along on the previous bend in the
trail. Only the footway’s ruts and roots, which held their
attention, and my holding my breath like a startled squirrel
saved me.
There are many theories on clothes and shitting, all individual
and personal. In time you will develop your own. Edwin, our next
case study, has a new theory about clothes after one memorable
hunting trip; whether it be to take them off or keep them on, I
haven’t figured out.
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