My wife and I lived on sailboats for ten years. It was great. Loved it. And there were not just a few idiosyncrasies with the lifestyle. But I won’t bore you with the list….I only mention it because there is a similar list of lifestyle quirks developing around living in a cabin. Let me explain…………
Some similarities: there’s the recycling-to-the-max syndrome, of course. The regular integration of left-overs into my diet where few, if any left-overs had ever ventured before. There is the unprecedented reverence and appreciation for the ‘right size!’ washer or bolt that provokes bizarre exclamations of joy and confirms the existence of God in more tangible ways than I had ever experienced before.
And, for me, anyway, there is the relatively quick degradation of personal hygiene. It used to be that clean hands and two showers a day was the minimum. When living on boats, showering is by the grace of the marina, public gymnasiums or ever-patient friends. Here, it is even more restricted. We now share a solar bag of about five gallons augmented by a nano-second-dip in the sea. We don’t yet have running water. Now, if my hands are clean twice a day, I am lucky. There’s nothing like dirt to welcome you back to the country, I always say.
I mentioned the boat experience for another reason, too. Seems a toilet (termed the head on a vessel) and the behaviours associated therewith were a fascination for all our friends and visitors while we were liveaboards. And, it would appear that the same interest is being displayed in our planned cabin plumbing. There is the not-so-subtle implication that somehow, we will have to ‘do it differently’.
I guess to some extent that was true while we were on the boat. We did ‘do it’ differently. Firstly, we tried to ‘do it’ while at work. Given that you are bored to tears and being paid for it, you may as well move a bowel or two on someone else’s time and porcelain, eh? The rationale for using such subsidized ‘down time’ was that marine heads are usually a pretty snug fit and ventilation and sound insulation are often at a minimum.
Many is the guest who enjoyed a meal on our boat complete with wine and other beverages for several hours or longer only to depart the vessel slightly bent over and mumbling something about having to get home to feed the dog. We would watch them half run up the wharf knock-kneed and clutching their lower mid-section, heading for the public washroom at the marina building. It was an amusing but convenient ritual. Guests should not stay longer than three or so hours and this was the perfect way to wrap up the evening. A strong cup of coffee could always prompt the large-of-bladder.
But cabin bathrooms are a bit different. One can be sewered, of course, but that means that you are more likely to be living in a condominium on a golf course than in a real cabin. You can do the septic tank thing, I suppose, but they are costly, prone to trouble and septic time bombs environmentally speaking. It would appear that from a cost perspective, both financial and environmental, composting is the way to go.
So ‘dried poop’ and it’s corollaries are now the current conversational topics of choice around our dinner table. It gets weird. We all seem to fixate on which brand of toilet paper decomposes best, and how anyone can debate this, boggles the mind…..who unwraps the used toilet paper scraps and determines whether it was “Charmin’ or ‘Royale’? Only university students doing a thesis, I bet….. “Oh yeah! This is a Charmin, alright……..and is it ever decomposed! Mark that down, Charlie. This is great! We’re going to get published!
We are now in the process of determining how much water we use and how much waste we produce. We sometimes even feel compelled to check on the use or production claims of others. That can be a bit touchy. We even watch what we eat (and share the reasoning with anyone who will listen!). I know what leachate is (it’s urine for the most part and don’t ask what the other part is). I know about microbes (there are ten trillion in a thimble full of ‘what-hits-the-fan’). I know about heat and ventilation rates to maximize composting and I know how to make grey water a garden delight.
I am going to write to Martha Stewart. I should think this is right up her alley. “Ten Delightful Ways to Present Compost This Holiday Season.” “Potpourri and Poop – the Perfect Combination!” “Our Most Popular Annuals and Perennials of the Microbial Type”. I dunno. Everything gets on TV, right?
But, getting back to where the Sun don’t shine…..to do this right in a green and politically correct way, it seems, I have to first take pride in my toilet, an interest I thought I put behind me (pardon the pun) when I was about three. Apparently I am also obliged to explain to people in their 30’s and 40’s how to ‘use the bathroom’. My wife took away the dirty pictures I was intending to rely on before she convinced me the verbal introduction method could be more fun.
I can see it now: leering and smiling, I lean over way to close to a new female guest in the house and say with a lilting and pleasant tone to my voice, “Soooooo, Carrie……..? Feeling a little bloated, huh? No? Well, just in case, let me introduce you to our very special privy. No, please come. Right this way. Take a seat. You never know when nature will call and we wouldn’t want to have to shout instructions through the door, now would we? This is our especially quick bio-degradable toilet paper………..so don’t linger too long in the process….hah, hah, hah.” I think composting toilet owners must have a hard time making new friends.
Sometimes you just have to sit and wonder…(that was ‘s-i-t’!)….just how far have we come? While it is true that we can clone sheep (although, they did a pretty good job of looking exactly like one another on their own) and we can genetically alter fruits and vegetables (long overdue, I say! They are so awkward to pack, don’t you think? It’s about time we had straight bananas and surely we can develop easier-to-open Avocadoes, eh?), we still marvel and fixate on basic bodily functions. I do anyway.
And I am not alone. It seems that pooping and the treatment thereof is the basis on which civilizations are judged. We think we are pretty damn superior to those who used to poop in the woods. Right? We’re told that we’re very advanced on this score. But, I must admit that I am beginning to wonder about that claim if the only difference is storing the whole shhhhhh-bang in a composter for few weeks before setting it free in the woods.
Our Off the Grid Home 