Incommoded
One advantage of holidaying in a National Park in 100+ degree weather is that you hardly have any available body water to pee into the parks loos, the smell of which, in high summer, is nostril rape of the most brutal sort. Date nostril rape, they’d call it since you willingly went into the nose-rape situation. It’s like having your nose picked by Death.
But, even when it’s hot, now and again you have to go.
By myself I’m fine – I tiptoe in and out as quickly as possible, touching as little as possible and then a quick shuddery, jowl-juddering jog about in the fresh air to feel clean again. It’s not pleasant but, of course, I understand that to plumb every potty in the US parks system would necessarily wreck all the nature we’re there to see. I am not for wrecking nature. I am a Nice Person.
With two little girls though, it is impossible to be this cavalier and nippy. You might think that with the 3 of us in there, proceedings would take roughly 3 times as long, right? Let me disabuse you of that ridiculous notion. It takes 8 times as long. A full third of this time is spent at the door trying to persuade one or other child there won’t be a slavering bear in there (Technically, this is my my own fault, having convinced them with ghastly tales on the 250 mile journey up there, that there would be bears crouching behind every tree and bush, waiting to gobble up any nice juicy humans that the mountain lions hadn’t already picked off. I was just trying to instill a sense of nature red in tooth and claw and such! A healthy respect for wild, raw nature. God knows modern kids get veal-fed massive doses of the tender, fluffy side of nature in bowdlerised books and cartoons. (Do you know the wolf in Goldilocks no longer eats Grandma, but locks her in the cupboard, is given a stern talking to by the woodcutter and skulks off shame-snoutedly determined to address his people-eating issues?) Where’s the balance? I was aiming for savagery.
Next the small child has to be actively persuaded to use the “stinky toilet! Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!” even as she hops around with steam coming out of her ears in her desperation to pee. She wants to know what the unspeakable stains and “bits” are round the rim and down the sides, and I can’t speak of them because they are so unspeakable. We all know what they are but it takes PC2 to say it.
“Poo! It’s Poo! Eeeeew!
By now, I have broken my own promise not to look – my vow to notice anything, everything in that chamber of horrors apart from the diabolical throne itself. My own horror kicks in as I envision my sweet, pinkly clean(ish) children clambering around over a hole easily large enough to swallow them whole. Whole and forever – because I sure as hell amn’t jumping in there to save them.
And then I realise I would jump in after them, of course I would, and it becomes all the more important to prevent them from even touching the filthy thing. The thought of them being anywhere near the excreta of 78 year old Mr I’ve Just Eaten Iowa with his surgical-support hosiery, his acres of leisure-shorts and his troubled expression, who has just exited the loo a moment before, fills me with bilious dread. I look at the toilet and before my eyes it turns into a heaving, seething mass of writhing germs, fanged bacilli, horned spirulae and streptococcal flanges. The walls move. The floor is alive with slithery treacherous pathogens. I command one girl to stand in the corner with her hands out in front so she doesn’t touch anything, and I hoist 40lb of other daughter up and hover her over the steaming mouth of hell.
We wait.
“What do you mean you can’t go?
“I can’t!”
“OK, we’ll try you again in a minute then. Problem Child 2, your turn.”
Problem Child 2 has both hands clamped over her nose. The temperature in the wee-wee hut is somewhere in the low
100s and the stench from the toilet pit is eye-watering.
I tell her to have a stout heart and hover PC2 over the loo. She goes! I sort her out and try again with PC1 who is now gagging convulsively and goose-bumpily, despite the infernal heat. We try again and this time she accomplishes the mission. Oh God, nearly there! My turn and then…! Then we three flee out into the sunshine running around with exaggerated shivering and Ministry Of Silly Walks bounding, shrieking with glee that the monstrous toilet chasm didn’t suck us alive. Bears! Where are you? You don’t scare us any more! For we have seen true horror. We have looked into the vilest void, the filthiest fumarole in the Sierras and lived to tell the tale.
I Purell the bejeezus out of our hands and we hike on. I think fondly of camping in good old Scotland where we just went behind a bush.
Now, by and large, park loos are fine, perfectly adequate and I’ve caught more germs from hospital canteens. But this little hut was the putrid anus of a kebab-sick dragon. When I think of all the bottoms that have swung over that yawning pore of hell – the sunken cadaverous cheeks, the vast dimpled buttocks, the smooth flat sheets of rear, I run and run through the extraordinary woods, the dappled sunlight with its lazy motes of forest fluff, the sweet good air and I thank God in His heaven for Mr Armitage and Mr Shanks.
But this isn’t just a post about lavs. No this is an existential post about lavs. For if three people pee in the woods and nobody hears them scream, did it really happen?
June 24th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
this made me laugh out loud, and drag up something on the internet I was sent a year or so ago.. do you know it?
http://www.woyano.com/view/5160/Finally—Now-i-know-why-ladies–well-read-it-yourself
June 24th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Honey, that’s priceless! I hadn’t seen that before but it is dead on. I know you must know all too well what any public loo situation is like with small children along as well. Compounded anxious misery. It’s a test of all our mettle. And now I’ve laughed myself into a desire to need my own gleaming and lovingly sanitised loo. Happiness is a clean toilet.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Heh! Your girls have learned that there are times you have pee past someone else’s poo bits. How they must have matured from that holiday into sadder but wiser young ladies! If you had boy he might have tried to dislodge the poo-bits with his pee. Actually I am shocked to learn that the loos in National Parks are unisex, and that Goldilocks had a grandmother, and that Little Red Riding Hood ate the woodcutter’s porridge.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Oh my Lord! It brought back memories of childhood and the outhouse in the northern woods of ME. The smell reaking from yards away…me gagging…my Grandmother would say I needed clothes pins and that kids who were unwilling to use an outhouse we’re like the princess and the pea. The only cruel thing she ever said to me… The shame…hordes of black flies and other odd shaped fanged crawlies. Nighttime was the worse as I would use the flashlight to check if there were snakes or some other more worriesome living fear below. The shadows…
I would hold it for as long as I coud until the pain was too much and then secretly run out into the woods and find a nice consecrated spot. But I always found it better and enjoyed my secret walks to my cathedral of pines and the pleasant scent of the woods and my joy of release.
Somehow I think there is a moral to this…Freud I’m sure would found it titalatingly fine anyway.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Nanas – yes! Little Red Riding Thingy! It’s the heat, the searing hot heat. 108 it was on Saturday and 102 or something today. My brain is coddling.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
jeremy – haha! Piddling in the pines! Is that like tip-toeing in the tulips? No, no, of course it’s not. What am I saying? I hardly know. The heat! The heat! Our AC’s on the blink. This evening I shall surf across the library to greet you on a wave of sweat.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
“don’t touch AQNYTHING it’s ALL dirty” yelled at toddler number two whilst toddler number one is on the toilet.. why oh why do they always grab the toilet brush.. yes whenever we are out, i tell you i need to invest in antiseptic wipes for my road trip!
June 24th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
um. thanks for not providing pictures?
June 24th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Blee, Sam!
Oh, I know the horrors of which you speak so well.
The worst outhouse by-fucking-far was the one I made the mistake of going into at the Oregon Country Fair. Are you familiar with that annual hippie gathering with festering exreta gathered from 1969 and on?
The smell lingered in my nose and mouth for 2 full days.
I couldn’t eat without tasting the remains.
Yack.
June 24th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
‘My own horror kicks in as I envision my sweet, pinkly clean(ish) children clambering around over a hole easily large enough to swallow them whole. Whole and forever – because I sure as hell amn?t jumping in there to save them.’
Ohhhh that made me laugh.My worst toilet I ever came across was a public loo in a tiny village in Mongolia. You had to balance on planks of wood which were over a hole in the ground. There was no hiding what was in the hole. Horror of horrors. No, mountain of horrors.
Worst still, the planks of wood which – technically- were supposed to be the walls had about ten centimetre gaps in between each one. Basically anybody who wanted to, could look in.
Even worse still, there was no other toilet for hours – and since there was nothing to hide behind in the desert, it was my only option. And it was about minus a pajillion degrees.
Sorry for taking you to my dark place.
June 24th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Honey, little hands get everywhere when they’re in the loo. We now have it down to a military drill in public loos. I bark orders about what they may not touch (anything), and always have a bottle of Purell in my bag because one of my kids sucks her thumb.
Kara, on our holidays I’m usually the schmo staggering about under the weight of knapsacks and picnics and discarded sunhats and articles of clothing and the water and binoculars and any small child whose legs are tired and needs carrying, so I don’t take too many photos myself. The hubs does though so they’re all on the his camera. They’ll come by and by but I’m leery about putting recent photos of my kids up on the big bad internet and they’re in a lot of the shots. You’re right though. I should have taken a photo of the worst toilet in the Sierras, but it would probably have melted the camera.
Medbh – yuck. You never forget these horrors, do you. For s long as I can remember I’ve had this recurring nightmares about not being able to find a clean toilet anywhere and running around a city desperate to find one. Hippie poo’s probably extra bad from all the raw foods and legumes mixed up with Twinkies and Ho-Hos and all the crap they eat when the munchies strike and they’re too ravenous to care for the moment about not giving money to the big food corporations. Hippie Twinkie waste. Bleurghy!
June 24th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
LaughyKate, dear God, that sounds horrific. That blows my tale right out of the sewer. At least noone could see us in the little Yosemite hut! Mongolia though – very cool! When were you there?
June 24th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
I was on a job there three years ago, or maybe it was two. That loo still makes me shudder. I just kept thinking, ‘I will never have to see the people who have seen my butt, ever again.’Unfortunately the image of what lay below me, will remain with me always.
Shuddery, shuddery, shudder.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:07 am
You have kids that say,”Eeeeeew”. Wow, is all I can say, along with how in hell did you manage that.
But is that NP not the kind of place where a wee behind a tree is allowed.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:20 am
Years of wild camping and the juniorest Drummlet is well trained in the outdoor lavatorial arts. Surely the wee behind the tree is allowed? Or is that a privilege only permitted to native Americans?
June 25th, 2008 at 2:40 am
Sam, dear Sam, your incredible writing ability allows you to conjour up not just detailed imagery, but texture, taste and smell too.
I fear I may never fully recover from this post…
June 25th, 2008 at 4:39 am
Bears waiting to eat you, pigtails throttling you, horror loos; Hebridean children are raised tough.
And what did you do to the swings after they’d been tied up?
June 25th, 2008 at 4:55 am
Glad you’re back safe.
Well done on negotiating the porta-potti. In 30 years of puttering about state and national parks, I’ve determined to either use the visitor center or stride purposefully into the woods. Although, to be fair, national park toilettes are better now than they once were. I’m surprised Yosemite’s are still not up to snuff, or “sniff” perhaps.
Cheers.
June 25th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Sometimes its hard to be a women
June 25th, 2008 at 6:20 am
Sam I would would rather bare my bottom on God’s clean earth than frequent those outhouses and/or nasty convencience store bathrooms. I used to try breathing through my mouth and forging ahead, but as a youngun, my step-dad told me if I did that I could taste it. It ruined me. We camp a lot in the summer and I avoid those like the plague. There is a always clump of bushes somewhere and by God, I use them.
June 25th, 2008 at 10:14 am
OH.MY.GOD!!!!!!! thank you, sugar!!! you am soooooooo over my depression!
xoxoxoxxo
June 25th, 2008 at 10:24 am
ha. luxury.
try the glastonbury festival toiilets after 3 days. nothing and i mean nothing in the world can compare to those cess pits of hell.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Vincent, I can’t even emulate properly how they say it. It comes out missing a crucial eliding vowel or something when I try. Pure California. Their vowels are still flat and their esses soft like mine, but they have got some real little Californiaisms too. My favourite is the combo: “Eeeeew! Guh-ross! And “For real?”
Conan, I would but 30 million people visited Yosemite last year and if we all peed behind the bushes the place would pretty soon turn into a yellow acid-burnt wasteland. Plus, I’d get caught, I know I would. I’d be the one caught with my knickers down, the one the rangers want to make an “example” of.
Kim, you know I did flirt with going more heavily into texture but I thought I’d keep my first venture into aroma-blogging just a simple scratch and sniff.
Inkspot, we told them they were filthy, sinning swings and that they would burn in hell for all eternity if they didn’t stop being friends with the round-about right away.
Rand, you know I did think of you and all your parks experience out there! And all the other parents who have ever had to hover their children. And all those aching spines. And then I thought, dammit, if all these parents can do it, then I can jolly well do it to. I damn near lost a molar from gritting my teeth through it all.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Sniffle, it’s certainly easier to be an upright pee-er in a chemical toilet situation. Next time I vow to take along some of these funnel things you can get for ladies to piddle standing up. Why has this invention taken so long to materialize in a retail situation? Why??
Savannah, still no joy then? I’ll be over in a mo.
King Wombat, I’ve spent a happy wee whiley snooping round your Reikidogs band site – it’s great! I love it. But, Mr. T indeed. You’ll always be Tombo to me, darling! Or Tombers. Or Tombly. Or Tombola. Or Thomas if I’m wild at you. How the babbie, old chum?
June 25th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
fumarole
that word was waiting all this time for your post, it can die happy now.
Shithouses from Hell. We’ve all got one. It’s like a JFK moment or something. There could be a good thesis here.
Maybe that’s what Hell will be like, one overflowing chemical toilet for every thousand of the damned.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Queuing outside Strepto MacCoccus’s Curry, Kebab & Semi-Fresh Oyster Emporium having just been disgorged onto the pier beside the diesely buses from a choppy Caledonian MacBrayne ferry-crossing.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:22 am
“Sinning…”. And “being friends with” is a euphemism for touching? That’s the voice of the kirk all right.
It seems that they were protestant swings (damned on their merits) rather than catholic (damned because they were predestined to be damned).
June 27th, 2008 at 4:22 am
Yep – kids and public toilets, a mix guaranteed to cause trouble. Sounds like you had an interesting time of it
But all back safe and sound.
One of my friends took her little girl into the cubicle with her, only for her to announce very loudly, ‘Mummy – you’re POOING! LOTS!’ at the top of her voice. Nice to give everyone a running commentary. Except she was peeing. But the wee one hadn’t grasped the vocab necessary to announce that.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Inkspot, they were Free Presbyterian (Protestantism with bigger canine teeth) swings: damned just because. Accepting Jesus Christ as their personal saviour would not be enough to get to heaven. They would also have to go to Witnessing on a Wednesday night and manage to be pious even when playing football (a more bum-clenching lope).
Jen, ha! My girls love to remark about hearing other people in public loos peeing. Some woman farted once in the neighbouring stall and my kids just shrieked with laughter in the otherwise empty bathroom. They couldn’t stop. I made them stay in the stall with me until I’d heard the poor woman leave, to save her any further humilliation. Brats!
July 1st, 2008 at 7:49 am
And the thing is – going behind a bush is such a fragrant experience and the cool caress of the dock leaf on one’s nethers is delightful. I so feel for your little one. Many’s the time I queue in theatre loos for hours and then can’t – in spite of whistles and taps turning. Fortunately I can last for ages – so far.
The worst ever was the hell hole in Pere La Chaise cemetery in Paris.