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It’s a Dogs Life…

When I was a kid on the farm we used to burn our trash in a barrel out back. For some reason, it always seemed like a ‘guy’ thing. You know, the old timers standing out by the burning barrel jawing about what the weather would bring. Maybe it was because it was always my brothers job to take out the trash, and my Dad was the one to burn it.

I grew up in Missouri and there was always critters around. I mean the wild kind, like raccoons and possums and skunks, squirrels, rabbits and an occasional coyote.

The biggest concern was when a pack of dogs would come around. They could be dangerous when all together, even though individually they belonged to a nearby farm and were probably great dogs, but get them together and you needed to make sure your dogs were put up and keep an eye on the chickens roaming the yard.

In the mountains of Tennessee, we have the usual critters too and then some. Any where you go you’re gonna have to put up with nearby neighbors dogs making their daily trek through the woods, and of course there are plenty of coons and possums and skunks, coyotes and squirrels.
One thing to add to the list is chipmunks. Oh, they are the CUTEST things! Little tiny rust colored bodies with two black stripes down their back, running here and there as fast as their little legs can carry them. You don’t see them all that much, but if you sit outside for a while and be real quiet, you’ll see’ em come out. They’re shy little guys.

I went first thing to the local hardware/lumber yard and got a 50 gal metal barrel to burn my trash in. In my of thinking, what doesn’t get added to the compost heap can easily be burned and that’s a little less to go to the landfill.

We have a lot more trash nowadays than people used to have. Everything has a package and there is so much more to buy in the stores than there was when I was a kid. Living by myself, I can generate a bag full every other day. It doesn’t seem possible, but I do.
So I start burning that trash and found myself, like my Dad standing out there watching it burn. I wanted to make sure it all burned down so that no critters would want to get into it. Maybe that was why he did it too.

The odor of burning trash turns out to be a beacon to every living thing within a 1/2 mile. The morning after I burned my first barrel, I looked out and the whole barrel was knocked on it’s side and the remainder that did not burn was strewed all over the place. So naturally I go out and pick it all up, place it back in the barrel and set the barrel back up on its concrete blocks.
I burned a new bag about every other day, but every single blasted night something came out and knocked it over and I had to pick it up again the next day.

Well, one morning I was out there picking it up and getting pretty aggravated until I stepped back and the heel of my foot landed in a very large pile of bear poop.

How did I know it was bear poop, you ask?

Because it was full of cherry pits, the kind that grow all over my property and were literally covering the ground. Tiny, sweet, dark cherries that I myself had been picking up and enjoying for the last week or so. Bears adore them.

Now, you have to understand, most people I know would be terrified, I however, was completely delighted. I actually had a bear come visit me! We have lots of them in East Tennessee and it was nothing unusual to see them, especially in town where they like to get into everyone’s garbage. I had even heard from the neighbors that there was a rogue in the area that liked to go through bags of garbage but I was delighted to know that I had my very own personal bear, and here was the proof!

I left that pile there, proudly traipsing everyone that came to visit up to see it. In the meantime, nightly without fail he would knock over my can whether I had burned anything in it or not and I would dutifully go pick it up, only now I didn’t mind so much because it was MY bears’ mess to clean. I had yet to see him, he always came while I was sleeping, but I knew he was around.

I eventually tired of picking up the barrel, and started taking my trash to the dump. I also decided I didn’t want to contribute to his delinquency, since nuisance bears are usually trapped by the rangers and hauled off to the deep interior of the national park, and the sad thing is, if they should hurt someone, the rangers have to trap him and kill him. I certainly did not want THAT to happen!

Even though I haven’t burned anything in that barrel for a couple of months, if it is in an upright position, by morning it will be on it’s side. I even laid a trap for him one time so I could get a photograph. I laid out a half a cantaloupe on a log in the yard. That darn cantaloupe laid out there for two days untouched, so the third day I moved it close to the barrel. I’ll be darned if the barrel wasn’t knocked over again, but the melon was untouched. What kind of bear was this?

One night as I was just falling off to sleep, I actually heard the barrel go down. I jumped up, grabbed the flashlight and quietly opened the door so I could finally see my bear. I shined that light out into the dark and there by the trash can were two eyes reflected back at me. He turned his head away from the light of the flashlight and then I slowly examined his big black body, only to find that it was a neighbors Labrador Retriever.

It’s wintertime now and my barrel forlornly lays on it’s side day and night. The bears are hibernating and the neighborhood dogs still make their daily rounds. I’ve gotten friendly with the fellow that monitors the dumpster site, but I haven’t given up on my bear. Come spring, I just know he’ll show up and I’ll have a new pile of poop to show my visitors, only this time it’ll be because he wants to come and eat the cherries, not because I’m burning the trash.

How to Conserve Water

When you don’t have running water you really learn how to ‘make do’.

I have three five gallon containers which I fill with drinkable water and three thirty five gallon rain barrels that I keep filled with either water from the creek or rainwater.

The only thing I really use the drinkable water for is coffee and cooking and water for the dogs, so it goes a long way. 

When I first moved here in the early spring baths consisted of half filling a  washtub with creek water. I learned to  easily bathe and wash my hair with about four gallons of water. I keep a milk jug  filled with clean water for rinsing. This winter I learned to use even less. You can easily do it with about 2 gallons if you really want to conserve.

Here’s how it’s done:

First, warm your water any way you like. You can use a cook stove, a coffeepot or a microwave, whatever you have. Go easy on the soap, you don’t need as much as you think to get clean. You can also use baking soda, which really works very well. Here’s an excellent article from Mother Earth News on that method Baking Soda Bath

Baking soda is also wonderful for washing your hair and even brushing your teeth. If you google it you’ll find dozens of uses for baking soda. Buy a large box of it found in the laundry aisle at your favorite grocery store.

Standing in the tub, wash your body first, then rinse with the water in the milk jug. Dry off and dress, then bending over the tub wash your hair next, using clean water from the jug to rinse. Try using a little Apple Cider Vinegar in your rinse water. It’s better than any store bought conditioner. Rainwater will make your hair soft without using any conditioner.

The bathwater gets dumped onto plants outside.

For washing dishes, all you need is two dishpans, one for washing, one for rinsing. You can empty the wash water onto plants also. The rinse pan I then use to mop the floor with. Add a little dish soap (Try Palmolive Free & Clear or Liquid Castile) and about a half cup of baking soda and mop away.

The used mop water is terrific for plants. Its a great fungicide and will really help soil that is too acidic. The soap also makes a good organic pesticide.

It only takes about a half cup of water to brush your teeth.I dip my brush into a small cup to wet it, apply a tiny amount of toothepaste, brush and spit, a mouthful to rinse, then swirl it into the remaining water to rinse it out.

Baking soda has an astounding array of uses. Here’s a book I recommend to find out more Baking Soda, 500 uses, Vickie Lansky

I have a milk jug I use with the top part cut out leaving a handle for any waste water. That goes onto the compost pile when it gets full. It usually takes a week to fill it up.

As the weather warmed, I built an outside shower. This is a terrific way to conserve water. You can use a found plastic pallet for the floor and sawmill lumber to build the walls. Use rocks from your property to fill in the floor for drainage. I have a total of $40 in the shower house itself. 

I put a gutter on the storage shed that empties into a fifty gallon rainbarrel. From there, I siphon the water into a 7 gallon wooden nail keg inside the shower house which has a 1/4 HP Utility Pump  in it which I purchased from Amazon.

This pumps your water into a Portable Tankless Water Heater which with a small lp gas tank gives you a virtually unlimited supply of hot water.

If you don’t have electricity to run a pump you can accomplish the same thing with a Zodi Instant shower. But I only recommend these for occasional usage. I don’t think they hold up well for daily use.

Don’t let your precious water just run onto the ground while you wash, I direct it right back into my nail keg until I need to rinse. This way, you only use about 2 gallons to shower with.

It is amazing how much water I get from rain. I have one gutter on one side of a 10 x 16 ft shed that has asphalt shingles and my rain barrel stays full, even though in my area we were way behind on rainfall for the year.

Eventually I will get gutters on my cabin and based on what I’m getting off of one side of the shed, I’ll get enough from the cabin for all of my water needs, including the washing machine. I plan on getting a large cistern to store the water in, and I’ll probably use the pump I already have to get it into the house along with a pressure tank.

 I will continue to use my Tankless Water heater for a shower except I will be using it inside the house in a bathroom I’ll be adding on.

One or two people really shouldn’t consume a lot of water. One of the biggest wastes of water is a flush toilet so if you’re composting waste that is a non-issue. See this page for my thoughts on that.

I’m sure there will be a few questions so feel free to comment and I’ll be happy to answer.

Santa, Schmanta….

Today I’m going to stay on the subject of Christmas. Santa specifically.
It’s a bit off subject, but hey, it’s that time of year.

I don’t know who started the idea of there being a Santa Claus but I understand it’s pretty much a worldwide tradition.

It’s a wonderful and charming, warm and fuzzy tradition that has delighted children for centuries. I’m not so sure it has been such a delight for parents however.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me to make the business of gift giving much more complicated if you’re a parent.
I had twin boys first, then another boy 21 months later. I have to say I’ve never had it easy money wise, and Christmas was especially hard.
Because of Santa, I had to buy double the amount of gifts for my children.
My boys weren’t any different from any other kids when it came to writing letters to Santa and putting out milk and cookies and sitting on his lap in the mall. They had high hopes that Santa would bring their dream presents to them.
Most years I had to let them know that Santa was having a hard time, and not to be too disappointed if they didn’t get everything that was on their list. Santa had so many more children every year it was difficult for him to keep up.
Like any other parent, within reason, I would do my best to make their wishes come true.
Then I would make sure I got to read their little letters to Santa so I would know what they wanted.
But, I also had to get them gifts from Mom, and they had to be decent gifts. I couldn’t let them think that Mom didn’t have good taste.
To further do damage to my budget, I gave each boy $20 so that they could buy gifts for family. I didn’t give them a regular allowance as I couldn’t afford to do that, and besides, I figured I shouldn’t have to pay family members to do the things that needed to be done anyway.
Now, twenty dollars is not much money to spread between about eight people, so they had to be very inventive, and they always managed to get some wonderful and thoughtful gifts for each person.

When they were very little we went to Grandma’s house on Christmas eve, then they had to go to bed early so Santa could come. On Christmas morning, all the gifts from Santa would be waiting, and of course, there were also stockings full of little goodies from Santa. Then they got to open gifts from Mom and then we ate Christmas breakfast.

As they got a little older I was getting a little tired of Santa getting so much credit, and so the gifts that were in their stockings turned into gifts from mom.

Eventually, as all children do, they learned that there was no such person as Santa Claus, so that helped my budget tremendously. Then I could take ALL the credit for the gifts they got and our traditions changed a bit. Christmas eve was at our house and gifts were exchanged from their Grandmas’ and Grandpas’.

We waited for Christmas morning to open gifts from mom (and TO mom) and to empty the stockings that hung from the mantle. We had our own private family Christmas that morning and it was sweet.

About 4 years ago, with the boys grown and gone, I gave up on Christmas mornings with my sons, and all gifts were opened on Christmas eve with the rest of the family.

The stockings still hung on the mantle, left forgotten.

The next year, all three boys felt the need to inform me that the stockings were what they looked forward to the most on Christmas, and what happened to that tradition?

Dog gone, all those years I struggled to buy double the gifts and all I really needed to do was go to the dollar store and buy a bunch of nonsense to make them happy….

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

A Tiny House and Holidays

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

I adore my tiny house.  It’s obviously compact, and yet I have everything I need.

I have a living room area with a couch and footrest,  end tables,  bookshelves,  a television,  my desk and computer.  I have a bedroom with a queen size bed,  a triple dresser and a chest dresser,  shelves for misc odds and ends and a rod to hang clothes on.  I have a tiny bathroom which consists of two buckets with Luggable Loo lids.  I also have a kitchen with a nice sized cabinet with counter space and storage,  plenty of shelves for all my food ,  a cupboard for dishes, cups and misc items,  a refrigerator and a small table that contains a microwave ,  coffeepot and a place to pile junk.

I live here with my three little ankle biters.  It’s cozy and warm and easy to clean.

I built a porch around it,  which in time will be covered, and that expands my space at least when it’s warm outside.

What else could one person need?

Tiny house living is pretty awesome on a daily basis,  but there is one huge drawback, at least for me,  and that’s the holidays.

I have a rather small family,  there are nine of us,  grandmother,  mom and dad,  three sons,  one with a wife and child.  Counting myself that makes nine people.

For many, many years,  my house has been the center of family gatherings for the holidays.  I look forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas the whole year long.  I spend days cleaning and cooking and I almost always set a formal table.  It’s the only excuse I have to get out the stemware and chargers and holiday dishes.  I always have a fire going in the fireplace,  candles abound,  Christmas music and Oh, those holiday smells!

I have many years of family photos taken in front of the same fireplace.  The mantle landscape changed and we all got older every year,  but it still remained the same.

Because my home now is too small to hold nine people and all the food,  Thanksgiving was moved to my son and daughter-in-laws home this year.  It was a wonderful family gathering and I still did the cooking for the family and we were happy to be together and we all took leftovers home.

Christmas has been moved to my mom and dads’ home this year.  Mom and I spent a wonderful day making cookies and candy and I will go to spend a couple of nights there to help with all the other cooking,  and it will be a terrific Christmas this year.

We have all decided for the first time not to exchange gifts.  Times are hard for all of us,  so my two year old grandson will be the one to open packages,  and I can’t wait to watch him.

Actually,  I’m looking forward to this Christmas more than any others for that very reason.  This has been the least stressful Christmas yet,   not having to worry about going into debt to buy gifts.  My youngest son brought the idea up first.  He told me that having the family together and eating good food meant more to him than anything,  and that brought tears to my eyes.

When you think about it,  that is so true.  We don’t usually remember over the years the gifts that we receive,  but we do remember the family gatherings and the photos in front of the fireplace serve to remind us of that.

So I have learned an important lesson from my youngest.  It doesn’t matter where it’s at or what’s under the tree or whether there is china and crystal and candles and fireplaces.

What matters is family,  and I am so grateful to have every one of them.

When a Tree Falls in a Forest

Did I mention I have a lot of trees?

Trees are a wonderful thing, but there can be problems associated with them. The first thing you must own is a chainsaw when you have trees. Sometimes they fall down, once in a while the wind whips through these mountains and breaks a tree in half, or large branches fall. So that was one of my very first purchases.

You have to decide whether they are a bane or a boon to your existence.

When I moved here, I had planned on living in my tiny house temporarily and I would build another small house higher up on the hill. My small house would be about 700 sq ft.

So the tiny house was placed on a spot farther down the hill in the easiest place to put it, considering all the trees.

I was violently opposed to cutting down a single one.

However, I really did want to have some electricity. “Power lines and trees don’t mix too well,” so the electric company inspector told me.

He informed me that not only would I have to cut trees on my property, but trees would have to come down on the right- a-way of others peoples property.

I had some thinking to do.

I would have loved to had solar power or wind power here, but there were some obstacles.

First, with all these trees, I wouldn’t have access to much sunlight, and second , the cost made my eyes cross.

Third, in East Tennessee we don’t have much wind, and fourth, the cost made my eyes cross.

So I had to reconcile myself with cutting down some trees. That meant hiring someone to do it. Theres no way I’m gonna tackle knocking down 100 ft trees, or cutting limbs off that are 75 feet in the air. My little 16 inch chainsaw wasn’t meant for that kind of work anyway.

It took a while, but I finally found someone to do it that wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg. I showed him all the trees the inspector said would have to come down and he got busy.

CRASH, BOOM, BAM!!

Down came the trees, and every time one fell, the pollen flew. It really was an awesome sight watching those monsters fall.

He cut those babies up into firewood lengths for me and left maybe a dozen in 12-16 ft lengths so that I could have someone saw them into lumber. He didn’t tell me it was all but impossible to get someone to come and do that. I also didn’t imagine the mess that would be left to clean up.

While he was here, he said there were several that needed to be cut down close to where I was going to build my house. They were either dead or damaged and it would be much easier to do it now rather than after I had a house standing there, so I agreed. A good garden spot was also an incentive.

CRASH! BOOM! BAM! Down they came.

Did I mention that I was violently opposed to cutting any of my beautiful trees down?

I couldn’t help but be reminded of that old  philosophical riddle “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

I believe it does.

Eventually I got power to the site where I was going to build, however I was living 200 ft away. For lack of finances the only solution was to run extension cords from the temporary pole to my little cabin.

Viola! I now have a computer,  lamps, a coffeepot and various other assorted electrical appliances.

I’m living in high style now baby!

Because there are so many trees I also found out I can’t have sattelite tv. There’s no way I’m cutting more trees in order to get more tv stations just so I can say there’s never anything good on!

So I have an outside antenna with a digital converter box and it’s wonderful! I now get 14 channels. There’s still nothing much on the tube, but at least I’m not paying for it….

Springtime in the Smokies

My land is covered with trees. I mean a lot. Very large trees that reach heights of 75 ft and more, all hardwoods with the exception of a few hemlocks and some rhododendrens and mountain laurel.
When I first laid eyes on it I fell in love. I would own my very own piece of the woods. My own private woodland to wander as I would, sit in a copse and contemplate life. I could make trails to follow even if they went in circles. I only have about an acre.When I bought it, there wasn’t a single leaf on any of them. They were all on the ground. Now, I’m not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to knowing what they are just by the bark.  I could pick out a few. Poplars and dogwoods, of course the rhododendren, mountain laurel and the hemlocks, ( they had leaves ) but the rest remained a mystery. Yet it was still so beautiful it took my breath away.
I could not wait till summer to see what this place looked like when the leaves were fully grown. I waited impatiently to see what kind of plants grew under the canopy of trees. The soil under the layers and layers of leaves was a deep rich loam and smelled primordial.
 No one had ever lived on this piece of dirt before. Whatever I did here would be my permanent legacy to these mountains.
I am a third of a mile from the boundary line of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, about a third of the way up Mt Cammerer, deep in the heart of the Smokies.As the crow flies, about 2 miles from the North Carolina state line and the Appalachian Trail where the road turns to dirt and you can wander through thousands of acres of wilderness.
 This is Cosby Tennessee, most famous for moonshiners and feuding. I was living in a mountain community. The only thing that could make it any better was if I had a creek or a spring, but hey, you can’t have it all. Not on my budget.
As winter turned to spring the greenery started sprouting everywhere. Leaves on the trees were too tiny and too far up for me to recognize, but on the ground, oh my, life was a-stirring!
Fiddleheads were poking through the soil,  vines were showing signs of life,  tiny trees were bursting from the acorns buried under mounds of leaves. The air smelled so fresh and clean and.. alive!
Yes, Spring does bring new life to these mountains. New birds were showing up in the canopy of the trees, the nearby creeks were flowing higher and the bears were coming out of hibernation, stretching mightily after their long nap and hungry for grub.
As Spring slowly stretched out, the dogwoods were the first to show their faces. I had dozens of them, all bursting with large fragrant blooms. I was so proud, you would have thought I created them myself. 
Fiddleheads opened into beautiful ferns under the trees, Solomans seal broke through with their graceful drooping branches, Galax abounded. Grapevines were recognizable, along with Greenbriar and Virginia Creeper. Morel mushrooms poked through the soil under oaks, and before I knew it, it was Ramps season. 
Time to head off for the annual Ramps Festival in Cosby. Bluegrass music abounds in these hills and you can eat your fill of ramps. Ramps and Eggs, called green eggs, ramps and taters, ramps and beans with cornbread, raw ramps, lord, no one gets too close to another this time of year! 
These mountain folk sure know how to have fun. Bring the whole family, including the dog, grab a frisbee and a blanket and a folding chair, sit back, eat your fill and enjoy the music and the glorious view of the mountains. This is living!
This is the life for me….

Nuts and Bolts

Sometimes, what one person thinks of as simplicity can be a nightmare for others.

I learned that when talking to friends and family about how I was going to deal with having no running water, no flush toilet and no electricity.

To me, it was simple. To others, it was a “no-way could I do that” situation.

I guess it comes down to how much you want something.

You see, I had done a lot of research on living in tiny houses, human waste composting, rainwater collection, reusing grey water and living ‘off the grid’ and I knew that these were things I wanted to do.

I don’t have the tremendous amount of money that some people put in to their sustainable lifestyles, but I’ve spent my life learning to make do with what I had. I’ve always believed that neccesity is the mother of invention, and boy howdy, can I invent when necessary!

One of the best inventions I’ve seen is a toilet seat that fits on a bucket called a Luggable Loo.  Yep, I could make a wooden toilet, and will in the future,  but why bother when I could pick a seat up for ten bucks? I especially like the portability because I still don’t have a designated bathroom in my house. It’s wherever I decide its gonna be until further notice.

If you don’t know anything about composting human waste I suggest you check out Joe Jenkins book called Humanure.  Also Carol Steinfelds book on Liquid Gold, The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants. Both make a lot of sense, and this type of thing is done all over the world and has a growing number of fans in the US. You can read my opinion about it here.

You can build a simple compost bin out of chicken wire, so that was one of the first things I had to get done.

For water,  I had  three five gallon water containers and three 35 gallon rainbarrels. I filled the five gallon containers up whenever I went to town for drinking water and filled the rain barrels from a nearby creek.

 It’s amazing how conservative you can be with water when it’s not running from a tap in your home. It takes me 2 weeks to use 15 gallons, and thats bathing, washing dishes, mopping floors, making coffee, everything. Find out how I manage that tomorrow.

Now, I will admit, not having electricity was a problem. I missed my computer, a television and lights more than anything. But it would be 2 months before electric lines would get run to my place. There were lots of trees that had to be cut, permits and deposits to pay and a temporary pole to buy.

So I learned to make the best of it. I used a coleman stove to cook on and oil lamps for light to read by. I had bought a tiny refrigerator second hand and used it like an old timey icebox. It was the first of April when I moved here and the weather was pretty nice, so most days I had the doors and windows open.

It’s amazing how much more connected you are to the rhythms of nature when you don’t have all the distractions of modern civilization. I spent most of my time outside working on projects or sitting around my campfire.

 The mornings are wonderful when you can hear the birds waking up and getting busy for the day. I saw the turkeys fly out of the trees in the mornings and couldn’t wait for the sun to come up so I could sit with a good book while I had my coffee. I’m an early riser and the mornings are my favorite time of day. I watched the fog rise through the trees and the owls settling in for a good sleep after a night of prowling. Neighborhood dogs make their rounds and the chipmunks and squirrels start their day early scratching through the leaves for goodies.

I was so much more aware of the weather, too. A bright sunny warm day meant I would be outside getting things done, and an overcast rainy day meant I was going to be inside listening to the rain on my metal roof. The wind swaying through the trees meant a change of weather.

I managed to get a small battery powered radio that got  three television stations and emergency weather broadcasts, so in the evenings I would still get to listen to my favorite programs.

It’s funny, when I first moved here I had envisioned Thoreau’s On Waldens Pond and just knew I would spend my time working on finishing the book that I had started some 3 years before. I never once looked at it though.

I stayed so busy, between going to work five days a week and then coming home and working on the place that I never seemed to find the time.

 Besides, Thoreau had said, “How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up and lived.”

I knew I still had some living to do…

First Things First

 I had my land and the house was sold, so the next thing to do is to actually move. I had two sheds in my back yard which weren’t part of the house sale. I had plans for them. Getting someone to move them 27 miles away was a trick, but I finally managed to get that done too.

One shed is 12 ft by 24 ft (288 sq ft). Thats the one I planned on living in. The other is 10 x 16, my storage shed.

Since I had a pretty good size house that I had lived in for 10 years I had accumulated quite a bit of stuff.  I confess, I am quite an accumulator of ’stuff’.  I love yard sales, flea markets and dollar stores.

The first thing to do is get rid of most of it, so a huge yard sale was in order. The hardest part was sorting through absolutely everything I owned and deciding what to keep. My new home was gonna be a little under 300 sq ft, so that doesn’t leave room for much.

The best part is that it felt really freeing. When you’re totally set on simplifying, it’s amazing what you can do without. My burden was getting lighter by the moment!

It amazed me that it still took one 24 ft truck and three strong sons fifteen hours to get me moved.  I still had an amazing amount of ’stuff’ that I couldn’t live without!

After everything was moved and everyone had gone,  I was left with a room full of furniture and boxes piled up so high I could hardly move.  No problem,  it was gonna rain for two solid days,  and I figured that would give me plenty of time to get my house in order and start my new life.

So here I am, no running water, no flush toilet, no electricity. I’m a tough gal, I can do it, I was thinking.  After all,  I love to camp, and my whole life my mother was a huge proponent of getting back to basics,  so I learned plenty about surviving the old-timey way.  I had a natural affinity for cooking outdoors, baking my own bread, using herbs for medicine and making do with what you had…

By myself,  out in the woods alone, with no electricity makes for a quietness that is astounding. There are so many noises in a home that you really don’t notice until they’re gone.

The hum of the refrigerator, clocks ticking, computers running, the washing machine, the dishwasher. Outside there are always cars going by, people talking, dogs barking. I always had either the television or some music playing and those were gone.

 The silence was deafening.

My cell phone didn’t even work out here. Too close to the mountains, too far out in the woods. I was completely cut off. No computer to connect with anyone, no television to find out what was going on in the world.

No lights either. Boy, is it ever dark in the woods at night, and there are an amazing number of noises going on at night in the country.

Hmm, am I really as tough as I thought I was?

What to Do.. or not

Now I know this is a controversial subject and that is because most humans have a difficult time getting past the ‘ick’ factor.

This stems from the Victorian days when people were wrapped up tighter than a drum, from the wire corsets to the stiff collars tight around the neck and no one ever talked about about sex, let alone any kind of bodily functions.

This is when the first automated ‘toilet’ was invented.

Before then and for the thousands of years that humans have walked the earth, human waste disposal is something that everyone had to deal with. It was an everyday part of life.

If you’re old enough, you may fondly remember the trips you made to the outhouse. I say ‘old’ and ‘fondly’ because memory usually dims how smelly it was and how you could sit and watch the spiders catch a fly in their web while you were doing your duty.

How about the late night trips with a flashlight or lantern when you had a bad case of the back door trots?

I bet you could remember every inch of the well worn path to the little house out back.

Don’t forget the worry of being inside when the neighbor kids decided to pull a prank and push the building over.

Before that, in cities, people emptied their chamber pots out the windows. Ever hear the saying ‘heads up?’  Now you know where that came from.

In medieval times, most castles had a garderobe. That was just a wooden seat with a hole and all waste, including kitchen waste,  just went straight out and down the side of the hill.  Sometimes into a cesspit or the moat  (and you thought a moat was romantic).  Imagine the poor sot that had to clean that up!  He had to fight the pigs and the dogs that eagerly snuffled through all that waste.

In the early nineteenth century the first ‘Earth Closet” was invented. This contraption was a wooden box inside the house and when you finished you pulled a chain that would deposit granulated clay, ashes, or earth on top of the leavings to help dessicate waste and prevent odor, and when it was full, the box would be removed to empty outside somewhere. Just a small step above the outhouse. 

Then along came the ‘Water Closet’. Well, let me tell you, this little invention won hands down in the Victorian age for popularity, because one could do their business and have it flushed away and you never had to think about it again. Most didn’t realize that waste was directed straight to the rivers and streams where their water supply came from.

In the world of toilets, mankind has made very little advancement since then when it comes to waste disposal. We like flushing and not giving a thought to what happens to it after that.

Cities are being overrun with waste and the cost is staggering. The flush toilet is the single largest consumer of water. The average family uses approximately 35,200 gallons of water per year. The cost for utlities infrastructure is around $500-$600 per person. The sewage treatment facilties for a large city can consume as much as 900,00 kilowatts of energy , 500 tons of chemicals and 45,000 gallons of fuel oil daily. Even if we had an abundance of water, the other resources flush toilets use have their limits. (Trivia Library, History of Toilets)

 Why, even a pit latrine is more ecologically sound and safe then a flush toilet.

Around the world there is a serious shortage of drinking water, and we are using it to flush waste down the drain, mainly because no one wants to think about it.

At the very least, why don’t we use greywater to flush our toilets with?

Sweden is one of the most ecologically advanced nations in the world. See the Clivus Multrum toilet system.

We need to wake up to the cost to our precious resources from our Victorian way of thinking about human waste.

For more information, check out The Humanure Handbook, by Joe Jenkins which you can purchase or download for free.

For further reading Carol Steinfelds’ book called Liquid Gold, is an excellent read.

Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive aritcle on the subject of composting toilets