A few weeks ago, the poorly-installed plumbing in this modest little home sprung another leak. Not the first but the third dripping section of pipe so far this year, the holes appeared inches from a major and intricate intersection of copper tubing a few feet past the hot water heater. Having already performed two other repair jobs and feeling more than up to the task, I took it upon myself to cut out the entire intersection and replace it with plastic tubing and push-on compression fittings. Naturally, my local home-improvement stores did not have in stock the parts I required, and I am still waiting for the correct parts to be shipped to me from the Internet retailer that sent me the wrong parts two weeks ago and has since been dragging its feet correcting his error. (Seriously, how hard is it to tell a 3/8” compression fitting from a 1/2” one?)
Living without faucet-borne water has forced me to make a number of changes in my life: I now import drinking water in from the outside at a cost considerably greater than that of pumping it up from the well; I now wash my dishes using rain-water collected in a 25-gallon cistern with the same water I use for clothes-washing (which I have been doing by hand in a collection of specially-designed buckets since the beginning of summer, anyway); and, most drastically, I have begun to defecate outside and to compost my feces rather than filling my toilet's reservoir with water from the stream twice or thrice a day (I have begun also to collect my urine instead of just pissing off of the balcony, spreading it over the growing mounds of leaves so as to speed their transformation back into dirt). I have not shit outside regularly for some years now, but beyond my feet getting wet walking through the frigid dew and having to assemble a nest of leaves upon which to catch my soft-serve excrement and with which to carry it over to the nearest composting sites, I find it nearly as enjoyable and not much less convenient than dropping deuces on the porcelain throne.
What, you may be wondering, are some of the benefits of shitting outside and composting one's turds? For one, as I am squatting and hugging my knees I can watch all the little critters as they move about in the grass, which trumps staring at a tile floor or re-reading old copies of Popular Science magazine, any day. A second benefit is the return of all of the unprocessed nutrients and trace elements contained in my shit to Nature's own growth cycle (I will be applying the compost to my gardens, come springtime). A third benefit is that I do not have to haul thirty-pound buckets of muddy water up from the stream multiple times a day, drag those buckets across the living-room carpet, or clean up the spills I make at the toilet's base when trying to pour their contents into a gap a few inches wide that sits four feet up off of the floor. Will I continue this practice once the proper fittings arrive and I can turn my jet-pump back on? I might. Will I choose to believe John Seymour's Guide to Self-Sufficiency, which urges the reader to compost his solid wastes rather than pumping them into subterranean holding tanks filled with bacteria, or will I revert to the old and tired ways and deprive the land of that which it needs, coaxing from it a lessened harvest? Handling feces is not the most pleasant of tasks, but when using a proper nest of fallen leaves or freshly-cut grasses and basking in the knowledge of just how good it is for making things grow, I may, someday, think it OK.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
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