Taking Care of My Shit
Editor’s note: For the past five years, Crash Barry has pursued the neo-homesteading lifestyle in eastern Oxford County. This is the first of a dozen essays about his attempts to live closer to nature.
In the gentle drizzle, the snow crunched under my boots on the well-trod path. Took seven round trips to carry the 14 covered buckets the hundred feet from the house to the compost. To avoid splatter, and mindful of the slight breeze, I slowly and carefully emptied each bucket into the special bin I’d built using wood scraps, pallets and chicken wire. Each five-gallon bucket, containing 30 pounds of shit, piss and sawdust, represented about 1.75 days, on average, of digestion in our household of two adults. Most of the weight was due to the urine, at about nine pounds per gallon. Most of the bulk, however, came from the sawdust, liberally applied to cover the new waste each time the bucket was used.
Due to a lifetime of shitty jobs, I’m not overly squeamish about dealing with manures of any beast. In fact, as far back as 1979, I’ve worked with sewage. As a broke 11-year-old marooned almost every weekend at an RV park in the hills of western Massachusetts, I made pinball and ice-cream cash by running a honey wagon, part-time. Catering to the seasonal campers who spent the summer parked at one site, I’d empty their holding tanks and haul the 50-gallon wheeled container to the campground’s dumping station, where I would offload, then head out to my next paying customer.
During the 1980s, I scrubbed a thousand toilets, first as a McDonald’s teen slave and then as a low-ranking Coast Guardsman. A good chunk of the mid-to-late ’90s was devoted to dodging loads of bullshit thrown at me by Portland media corporatists. By the turn of the century, though, I was back to manual labor, working as a professional cleaner specializing in reclaiming apartments abandoned by angry dying men, poor souls who desecrated bathroom walls, leaving my colleague Brahmsie and me to scrub away the filthy, dark brown signs of sorrow, despair and disease. Next was a weekly stint cleaning the men’s and ladies’ rooms at the Skinny, the infamous Congress Street rock club, in exchange for a generous bar tab. Five years later, I found myself living and working in Eastport as a six-day-a-week bathroom scrubber, grill cleaner and scullery technician at the now-defunct restaurant The Pickled Herring.
My subsequent farmhand gigs exposed me to thousands and thousands of tons of fecal matter. I’ve been shit on by more diarrhetic dairy cows than I can count, and stepped barefoot in many messes left behind by pigs, goats, sheep and chickens. I spent a particularly long summer as a latrine attendant for a herd of pregnant, pampered alpacas, shoveling their piles of bean-like pellets, then composting the fruits of that labor.
My point is this: I’m no stranger to shit. So the decision to remove our perfectly functioning flush toilet, connected to a brand new septic system, and switch to the buckets was no big deal. First of all, even at two gallons per low-flow flush, combining shit and water has always seemed sinfully wasteful to Sweetgrass and me — especially in light of the global drinking water shortage. And since our household water comes from a dug well that gets dangerously low during dry spells, conservation is a regular part of life here on the edge of the woods.
About four years ago, we replaced our commode with a wooden box built by Sweetgrass, topped with a store-bought toilet seat, that hides the five-gallon bucket. A small trash can full of locally sourced pine shavings sits within reaching distance. Except for having to store, then lug and dump the buckets every three weeks, the rig functions just as well as any modern chamber pot. Water use is minimal. It takes less than 15 gallons, plus a couple cups of bleach, to scrub and sanitize the 14 buckets after emptying.
Unlike a traditional food scrap and/or animal manure compost pile, which becomes soil faster with regular turns of a pitchfork, we leave these finished piles alone. Ignored for over a year under a thick blanket of mulch hay, we rely upon nature’s alchemy, and the heat of the heap, to transform 12 months’ worth of our excretions into eight cubic yards of rich, dark soil. Our waste remains part of the local ecosystem, with practically no negative impact on the planet.
Although I have a basic understanding of biochemistry and how the mound’s 160-degree internal temperature converts our excreta into harmless earthen dust, we don’t use this dirt to grow either food or ganja. Whether this is instinctual or some sort of learned cultural revulsion, I’m not sure, but we’re reluctant to add the stuff to the veggie or medicine gardens. So our composted humanure is reserved for flower beds and for filling low spots in the pasture. This seems silly, since we use properly composted manure from other mammals without hesitation, and most folks don’t seem bothered by agricultural industrialists sludging fields with municipal bio-solids.
I’ll admit that flush toilets allow for almost effortless disposal of the toxins and poisons of the modern diet. They’re an engineering marvel and have improved sanitary conditions for countless overcrowded communities. Flush-it-and-forget works well enough — for now. Flush toilets emptying into a sewer are considerably better than open cesspools or the slippery shit-and-piss-coated alleys and cobblestoned streets that plagued life in the Dark Ages and the Old Port.
Post-flush, the collective flood of indigestibles, plus brews of cleaning chemicals, pharmaceuticals, tampon applicators, wet naps and Taco Bell, are spirited away, underground and out of sight — piped to distant treatment plants where they are mixed, spun and baked into bio-solids, a.k.a. goldshit, then sold to Big Agriculture and uninformed home gardeners, who grow food in the treated waste of the masses.
Still, a low-flow toilet flushed six times a day uses over 250 more gallons of water every three weeks than our bucket method does. Factor in the energy required to pump water from the source and sewage back out, plus the expense of infrastructure, labor and other ancillary costs, and it becomes clear that the price and environmental impact of modernity’s collective defecation and urine disposal systems are obscenely high. Plus, my general distrust of government (and the Toilet Bowl Cleaner Industrial Complex) makes me question the logic of humans depending upon greedy, crumbling institutions to deal with such a primal and urgent need.
Of course, our low-budget method won’t work in most of urban or suburban Maine. I shudder to consider the 180,000 buckets potentially generated every week by residents of Portland. However, better models of composting toilets, systems designed and installed by experts, work extremely well in schools, dorms, factories, office towers, stadiums, libraries, mega-churches, turnpike rest areas and other places where lots of people need to shit and piss.
I don’t intend to be lugging buckets forever. Someday we’ll purchase the highly efficient and low-maintenance BioLet composting toilet, regarded as the best of the manufactured models (and particularly well suited for sailboats and other remote applications). The ingenious design includes a urine diversion feature that separates solid and liquid wastes — which, to me, would be a welcome function given the aforementioned weight of liquid waste. However, the BioLet’s thousand-dollar price tag doesn’t currently fit our budget. Until then, the buckets work fine.
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Industrial Wind Power Moratorium update…
As I predicted in my May 2014 cover story on the evils of the faux-Green Industrial Wind Power Industry (“Against the Wind”), a group of Maine activists is circulating citizen-initiative petitions with the goal of collecting the 50,000 signatures necessary to force a vote to repeal the Legislature’s 2008 Wind Energy Act. Maine law encourages out-of-state energy speculators to suckle off subsidies and blast the tops off our mountains to reach the Act’s goal of installing over 2,000 unreliable wind turbines (at a cost of over $10 billion) — turbines that only generate expensive power sold to suburban Massachusetts. E-mail N7CD@gwi.net for more information about the effort.
As I noted in the story, if the issue does reach the ballot, I plan to offer free guided bus tours of the western foothills and mountains, highlighting the negative impact of industrial wind on Maine’s rural communities and wilderness areas.
