Toolik Tissue, July 13, 2011

(A word dump I published and distributed to all 13 Toolik bathrooms for resident reading pleasure while taking, well, a dump.)

Here at Toolik the wonderful concept of a pit latrine has been elevated above ground. A platform supports three stalls, each holding one typical outhouse stool. Each stool begins a chute connected to a holding tank, which is emptied and taken away by CH2MHill Polar Services in a big red sump truck. At first, staff measured fullness of the tank from the outside, but that made some folks uncomfortable and Winter Leaf Green is a much more appealing surface color. Now we guess the level of the holding tank the old fashioned way--estimating the distance of the surface by the horseshoe-shaped reflection framing your head. Another way to tell is by paying attention to the time it takes a turd to fall. This is the beginning of rocket science.

There is a good old privy next to the white farmhouse in South Dakota where my mother grew up, and her father before her. Mom told me she used it only in emergencies, since there was a plumbed lean-to bathroom added on in her generation. I remember wishing the outhouse was still functional when I was a child, because every time we visited the water looked and smelled like it had been sitting in the pipes too long. There have been many other pit latrines in my life. For two important summers of my childhood I pooped in an outhouse without a door, looking out at sage brush and ponderosa pines, listening to cicadas, pulling toilet paper out of a Folger’s coffee can, and being frightened by the occasional bot fly. Spending four months in equatorial Africa, I mastered the squat-and-aim over a narrow hole and learned that in such a position pinching is usually unnecessary. I would like to have a pit latrine at my future home. When it is full enough, I’ll fill it in and plant a tree. None of this water business . . . no need to increase the mass and spread anymore of that stuff on this planet. Whoever decided storing urine and feces together for long periods of time lacked the common sense of an elk, since it is the festering mix of the two that create that nauseating smell. It was a sociopath who decided it was a good idea to add water. There is such a thing as a separating composting toilet, which makes sense when you think about it. After all, #1 and #2 do come out at different angles.

My peace with the Toolik Towers had to be established early, thanks to my lack of coordination and grace. My third day on the job, armed with a spray bottle of cleaner and a roll of brown paper towels, I ascended the metal steps and opened the green door. I gave the stool surfaces a spray-over and set the bottle next to the extra toilet paper stack. Taking the loose end of the roll in my right hand, I flipped it confidently toward my left to tear off 3 neat squares. Unfortunately, my left hand missed, and the stool was still wide open. Down, down, down the chute 3 squares unrolled 20 times, and the roll hit the sludge with a “sploot.” I held on to the end of the towels, afraid of the beast at the other end of my leash. “Shit” I appropriately termed the situation, and gently began rerolling the towels, lifting out the paper square by square. The fat guy who drives the red sump trunk probably wouldn’t be so cheerful having to dislodge a soggy cardboard cylinder from his hose, or worse, some Toolik employee having to reach it some other way. Eventually the paper train was emerging saturated and foul-smelling. I had a vision of my grandmother soaking the blue rolls of patterned paper and smoothing it onto the new farmhouse bathroom walls, and wondered how strong Toolik Poop Glue might be, combined with industrial brown paper towels. At last the end appeared, the cardboard spool still attached, and I, resisting the urge to decorate, gave the whole wad a wring, dropped it in the trash bag, and tied it off. I repeated the last two steps twice more. Then I opened the door and played it cool the rest of the day, after throwing away my gloves and scouring my hands five times up to the armpits.