How (Not) to Shit in the Woods

Excerpt from “Burly Bush Man”

One of the main reasons people tell me they never could have gone planting. Where do you ... you know ... pee oh oh pee? Well, let me just push back my sleeves, give you a folksy clearing of the throat, and lean in.

There are three primary methods to shit in the woods.

The first: you squat. Self explanatory. Whip your pants down, bing bang boom, try not to pee-oh-oh-pee on your shoes or your clothes. Very business-like.

The second: find a good log—high enough that you’re comfortable—hang half your ass over, shit down the back of it. The chances of soiling your clothes are greatly reduced by the presence of the log. This is not a preferred method of mine. The right sort of logs are hard to come by, and you have to maintain a kind of balance, propped on the log while not actually sitting with any stability.

The third: find a sapling you can wrap your hand around, hunker down and lean back. The chances of pooping on your shoes or your clothes are greatly reduced by the relaxed posture, yet you have a secure and comfortable stance. If I didn’t have a toilet in my apartment I’d go to Wal-Mart’s gardening department, pick out a nice six-foot aspen, plant it in the backyard, and put up a blind.

Extremely rarely, one might find Mother Nature’s own personal crapper: a hollow stump with roughly the same circumference as a toilet. I’ve known planters who wouldn’t normally bless the block with their offerings but who’ve done so just because they spied the perfect opportunity, hoping their foreman wouldn’t choose that moment to come check their trees to find them perched bare-assed six feet up atop a stump.

In camp, the day’s gastronomic activities were a close neighbor to the weather, just another natural phenomena—one of those minor taboo barriers people were happy to break, enabled by the outside context. Like bears, we shat in the woods every day, kept an eye out for good spots and went about it joyously. We compared prime finds and methods at supper, and spoke of taking a crunch, or a good solid hud, or going for a pinch, as easily as we said Please pass the salt.

A friend once bounded up to the van at the end of the day with no sleeves and two squares cut from the bottom of his shirt. With a terrific grin he hailed us and called, “Guess what happened to me today!”

∞

I wasn’t cut out to be a partisan of block pooping. I didn’t like baring my bottom to the bugs, tall grass tickling my ass, nor did I like having to stop work. Worse, I was negligent with toilet paper. Never could I keep a roll clean and dry in my back bags. Most of my planting career, the first day of the season I’d tie that end of me up tight until after supper and then use the camp outhouses, relaxed, familiar, routine. That then became my schedule for the rest of the summer. In the mornings I could hop up and soldier off to work mostly free from biological distractions all the long day.

But that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to flying the fleshy white flag of going au naturel while out in nature. On the contrary, I consider it should be a mandatory part of growing up, like getting inoculated in junior high, except instead of being protected against polio, rubella, or the measles, the inoculation would be a preventative against being a spoiled, arrogant, son of a bitch. As far as I’m concerned, shitting in the woods foils the conspiracy to make us forget that we ever swung from the trees, and brings us back to our knuckle walk. When there’s no genteel plop of water, you understand the animal nature of yourself a little better. That separation of civilization is eroded.

Make a day of it. Load the students onto a bus. Bring them to the forest—not a park, a grove, or an aspen stand—a real forest. Give them a glass of water, a laxative, a roll of toilet paper, and send them on their way. Easy. Save civilization for the kindlier sapients.

The school nurse wears a white smock and white shoes in the tall green grass. She blows a whistle, exclaims, Run free, children! Go free! Away the wee ones scamper, gleefully lording over nature’s bounty, hacking and slashing to their hearts’ content, jamming sticks into burrows, plucking the pretty living flowers, blissfully unaware of the transformation readying deep down in the bowels of their vicious little psyches.

One by one they vanish into the woods, to abashedly straggle back to the bus without being summoned a short time later, appearing ponderous, stupefied. Little is said on the ride home. They’re true men and women now, butterflies who realize they’re just worms blessed with beautiful wings.

The majority of people would probably prefer a needle.

After that trial, whenever you had reason to bare the naked pipes in your home, or replace them, it would bring a tear to your eye to see the bones of your beloved civilization exposed so. Before the plumber you’d salute those black tubes and lament the leak that prompted their replacement. Plumbers themselves would be handsome men and statuesque women, coveted matrimonially, with masters degrees in hydromechanics and elocution. No dickering would ever be done over the bill.

∞

The job was this x 100,000

∞  

My first year, our facilities were too nice, too modern, which was a real setback seeing my budding burliness demanded I sacrifice my civilized self in every way. Showering was taboo, so too laundry. I was becoming foulmouthed like a sailor. I was committed now. It was only natural I emulate the bears.

In my back bag I had a roll of toilet paper tucked inside a plastic sandwich baggie I had lifted from the breakfast table. I surveyed my new piece ponderously. The rain that day was waiting until the afternoon to dreary us.

Here I would do it. Here I would finally shit in the woods.

Already I’d put it off too long that morning, wanting to focus more on getting trees in the ground early while I still had a spring in my step. Four hours later, around eleven, it was rapidly becoming a choice of taking a shit in the tree line or needing new pants. I did a line of trees to the back, a brick in my belly each time I bent over, and when I planted that final tree in the shade I looked up in dismay. Now that I was near it, the tree line wasn’t what I thought it was. It was only two or three trees thick, like a fence with wide, mossy pickets. I could see Glasses Colin from Gerard’s crew filling in the back of his piece diligently on the other side. He saw me standing there like I’d been knocked on the head and halloo’d me cheerfully.

I should have halloo’d back and then said, “Colin, I’m taking a crunch back here. Don’t look, man, if you don’t wanna go blind.” And it would have been okay. But I was a yearling yet, and wobbly on my feet. I swore at him under my breath and waved at him like I were swatting a fly. The only other spot worth consideration was a strip eight to nine feet wide that had been left in the middle of my small piece. The machines shaving the block had avoided the spot and its small twisted spruces, the tallest no more than eight feet high. The strip was probably marked down later as habitat trees. Probably declared home to a herd of caribou.

So be it. I’d struck a deal with my body and my obligations were due. That forlorn line of orphan trees would be my chrysalis.

A gentle wind on your bare bum is another one of those rarefied joys remembered by the uncivilized belly that not every civilized soul gets to experience. If you haven’t felt that cool caress of nature’s hand, and happen to possess a particularly dark back yard ... well, I digress.

I rose as a beautiful butterfly of a man, leaving my white scar on the ground against the dark of the moss, and strode away regally, back to my shovel, back to my little fuckers, buoyant with the lightness bestowed by new experience.

An hour or so later, Shelly hailed me from the next piece over. “Lee, have you seen Rob? My piece is way too small and I’m almost finished. Can I hop in with you after I’m done?”

I tried not to look over towards my small victory against civilization half-hidden by the trees. I had yet to plant up to it, and I didn’t want Shelly to stumble over it.

“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you start on your side of the piece. We’ll meet in the middle?”

The rain that had been holding off all morning started then as light mist, a kiss of moisture that made the sweat I already had itch like bites of fire, but as I put my head down and willed myself onward I didn’t have time to stop and touch all the tingles in my armpits and sides and pinging like pinpricks down my back. Shelly was a faster planter than me, and five minutes later she was working down my opposite line.

I could plant around the small stand where I’d had my small victory against civilization, subsequently my secret shame, and I met Shelly on the other side of it, closing the gap of open land quickly. Rob came shortly after and Shelly explained why she was in with me. Rob apologized for the inadequate piece he had cut. Because of it he had to move the two of us sooner than he’d expected.

Shelly went to gather her things and I colored in the rest of the white space while Rob looked over a few of my trees. After a few minutes he came back to me and he said, “Your trees look pretty decent, Lee. Watch the leaners. I found a few shallows. And next time … bury it.”