Chapter 10: Longing for a longdrop.
Rocket overseeing the dig (or perhaps worried about where Felix is going.) He’s a good boy. They both are.
There was one aspect of the camping experience I detested, (and if talking about poo offends you, you might want to skip this chapter). Turns out, our neighbour Jim was right - it’s really, really hard to dig holes in trap rock country - or crap rock, as we started calling it. In those early days of camping, you could tell when someone was trying to find a good spot to go to the toilet. From far away, the blonk, blonk, blonk sound of the mattock hitting hard ground would echo down the hill. There’d be a pause, more blonking a little further off, another pause, some expletives echoing off the granite, then some rapid blonking as the need became more urgent. The ground under the Melaleuca shrubs was ra bit softer and less rocky, but that entailed lot of crouching and crawling and getting spiked in sensitive areas. The only other option was out in the open where the land had been cleared and silt had collected over time. This of course held a different challenge, especially when visitors came to stay.
‘I’m going to the toilet,’ someone might say.
‘What direction?’
‘East.’
‘Righto.’
Then we’d all look west, north or south for a while. Invariably someone would forget about the directive and let out a gasp of surprise which would make everyone else turn around and say, ‘What is it?!’ Oh, right. Sorry.
One day, while trying to chip my way into the ground deeper than two centimetres, it occurred to me that the previous owner must have had some system for sanitation. Surely he hadn’t roamed the block on a daily basis like a crazed and confused archeologist? Yet there was no sign of a long drop (an outdoor toilet sitting over a deep hole in the ground).
We’d noticed quite a lot of rock piles dotting the block. At first I’d thought they were the product of a charming pastime, like collecting shells at the beach. Then someone said it was likely there was a poo at the bottom of the pile - perhaps more than one - probably decomposed by now, but still, a poo. I looked at these charming cairns differently then, gave them a wider berth, but before long, we were adding our own rock formations to the block. It wasn’t great. Overbalancing while squatting was an issue on the hilly terrain; there were ticks, just waiting to pounce and sharp, dry grass spears angrily defending their spot of earth. Go away! Do that somewhere else!
Then one day, the scales, already heavily weighted against squatting, finally tipped. Schultzy came running back to camp with toilet paper stuck to his beard looking extremely pleased with himself. Repulsive. My stomach lurched. Enough, already. Smash took him off to the dam to give him a wash, and I got my notebook out to make a start on a long-drop toilet design.
Like most of my building endeavours, form quickly overtook function. I’d had these silky oak windows under the house for years that I’d planned to use on our renovation but never did. I imagined them in a row on either side, so we could enjoy the view from the loo, see the passing wildlife and the room would be spacious, not some pokey little cubicle (to do what in, I’m not sure). The thunderbox would be green, and I’d get a green hand towel to match, some entertaining reading material, solar powered fairy lights to illuminate a rock bordered path to the toilet at night. (Every thing we do on the block involves rocks.)
Throughout the design process, I liaised with Josh who agreed to build the structure and dig the hole with his excavator. He didn’t seem that interested in what colour the hand towel would be, and was more focused on the structure and what kind of base it would be built on, so it could be towed to different locations, sled like, if and when the hole filled up. Genius!
When it arrived on the back of Josh’s trailer, there was cheering and clapping - smiles all round for this marvellous milestone. The hole had been dug, about 1.5 metres deep by .8 wide in a secluded spot amongst the Melaleuca shrubs with Josh’s son, Felix, doing the final hand digging down in the hole. Josh had installed a plastic garbage bin under the seat, with the bottom cut out of it to ensure no critters could climb up and surprise us. We pushed the old girl off the trailer and slid her into place. Smash attached a toilet roll holder to the wall, then we put in a bin and filled it ash from the fires to help to keep the long drop smelling sweet…ish.
Nice work, Felix. Last time you’ll be smiling down there.
I hung a curtain made from a vintage floral fabric for when visitors were around. Smash wanted to get a door, for extra privacy, but I figured, it would mostly be just the two of us using it. How wrong I was.
A couple of weeks later when we arrived to camp again, I went to the toilet and was stunned to see blood, mud and faeces all over the floor, walls and thunderbox. (While I usually say ‘poo’ instead of ‘faeces’, the toilet looked like a crime scene, and being a first responder, I felt I should use the appropriate language.) It looked like a large animal had given birth multiple times in there, painfully, or two animals had fought to the death. There were sweeping brush marks of blood, swirling skids and splatters, hardened blobs of dark matter. The scene had a neck-tingling Texas Chainsaw Massacre vibe about it and it freaked me out. I ran back to camp and babbled news of my discovery to Smash who annoyingly, got stuck on an irrelevant detail.
‘Why are you calling it “faeces”?’
‘Who cares! That’s not the point.’
‘Just sounds weird.
‘Poo then. Whatever. You need to come and look. It’s horrific.’
He didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation. To be fair, I am prone to hyperbole, so he was probably mentally halving the amount of blood and gore.
‘Probably a sheep,’ he said.
‘Doing what!?’ I asked. ‘Committing Harakiri?’
Smash gave me a ‘Don’t go getting all hysterical’ look and refused to rush over and check it out for himself. I decided to leave the mess there for him to see, and I have to say, I got an enormous amount of pleasure out of hearing his querulous, Ned Flanders scream of horror when he next went to the toilet.
It took ages to clean it up; the blood stains wouldn’t come out of the timber and in the end I decided to just paint over it. What happened in the long-drop is now forever preserved in the long-drop. We never did work out what kind of animal had been in there, or what they’d been up to.
Pigs, Jim suggested, the next time he dropped over for a cup of coffee.
‘Doing what?’ I enquired again without the hysteria, handing Jim a slice of apple tea cake.
‘Well now, I just don’t know, Kate,’ Jim said. He seemed uncomfortable. He shifted in his seat and took the offered plate. ‘All sorts of weird things happen when the drought gets bad.’
And there we were, back at the drought. Jim’s home turf. I wondered what he talked about with his wife and friends in a social setting, and whether he had any interests or hobbies, other than the drought. He gestured toward the eastern side, where the granite and thick bush met the dingo fence. ‘All sorts in there, Kate,’ he said.
‘Of..?’
‘All sorts, Kate.’
That’s one thing I’ve noticed about our farmer neighbours: they find a point and stick to it.
Since then, we’ve had other visitors to the toilet - no snakes, thankfully. Birds love it, as do spiders, paper and mud wasps, and there is always a variety of animal poo pellets on the floor and paw prints - once a sheep’s skull, but I think that was something Schultzy found in the bush and hid there, thinking he was being clever. One time, we arrived back to find a whole roll of toilet paper running all the way from the holder off up into the bush. I imagined a wallaby accidentally tucking the paper into its pouch and hopping away, unaware it was trailing the long white flag of shame. (This once happened to me at a 21st birthday party I attended in a hall many years ago and I still blush when I think about it. After using the toilet, I inadvertently caught the end of the toilet paper roll in my jeans when I pulled them up. I could’ve walked straight from the loo to sit down at the nearby table with friends, but no, I decided to walk the entire length of the hall and across the dance floor to request a Cure song from the DJ. It had been a full roll.)
Smash wanted to get Poo Cam, so we could see what went on there when we weren’t around, but I wasn’t sure it would be worth the effort, and of course there was the issue of privacy.
So now, the toilet has settled nicely into the landscape; she’s a beauty. Nestled amongst the Melaleuca, the rock lined path is complete, fairy lights strung. The magazines probably need a turnaround - we’ve had the same copies of Farm Machinery and The Music.com in there for quite a while now and I’ve stared at Helen Garner’s face on the June 2018 issue of The Monthly so many times I feel like I know her. (I wish.)
If I have any advice to give on the topic of sanitation on a bush block, it would be to get that long-drop or composting toilet in toot sweet and make it as comfortable as possible. I’ll leave the door option open for you to decide.
Delivery day.
