If you’re used to working in camps with porta potties that are regularly (or even irregularly) serviced, you’re lucky. When I started in Northern Ontario, the shitters were tents with toilet seats placed over holes dug in the ground. When the holes got full, they were filled in and the tents were moved to a new hole. Digging and filling shitter holes was unpaid planter labor, which seems almost incomprehensible to me now (along with unloading reefers, camp set up and tear down, driving, and a variety of other almost unbelievable culturally accepted sketchy business practices).
This is how we find ourselves standing in the rain at our Fushimi camp, crowded around an overflowing shitter hole, shovels in hand. It’s been raining for ten days straight and camp is in a depression below water level, so when you drive down the dirt path into camp the lake that lies beyond is at eye level. The shitter holes are thusly filed to the brim with shit, piss rain water and ground water that has seeped up from below. Every shovel full of dirt thrown into the pit just makes the foul water rise closer to the edge. There is no stemming the flow. Most planters are hiding in their vehicles, waiting to be allowed to depart, but we won’t be allowed to leave until all the camp teardown tasks are accomplished, and this one is truly monumental.
I am screaming into the rain while I throw shovelfuls of gravelly earth into the pits and they splatter back at me. Maybe six of us are going about the horrid task, possessed of a vehement hatred of everyone else that has bailed, rage growing with every blackfly bite or splatter of sewage-water to the eye. Finally it dawns on us that we need to dig a hole adjacent to each shitter hole, then dig a short dam in-between each to provide an overflow/relief hole and then fill in both holes. It’s the only way.
We dig furiously in the rain, hands blistering against the hard earth and I am screaming still, “If you’re not doing anything, come and pick up a fucking shovel, and also, FUCK YOU!” I’m still a subscriber to the community aspect of camp at this point, not yet questioning the dubious ethical aspect of the free labor. We’re like a prison chain-gang out in the rain and the mud and isn’t it true that treeplanting itself used to be prison labor?
Finally the first relief hole is dug and we break the dam in between and as the foul water rushes across, I see a single kernel of corn caught in its current, and I absolutely fucking lose it. “CORN!” I am screaming at this point. “When did we even eat corn?” And then we’re all laughing so hard in the rain that we’re trying not to fall down in the biohazard we’ve created, and we’re slapping each other on the back, and I’m crying with laughter, and eventually, more hands with more shovels arrive on deck, the holes are filled, and we depart for town.
I absolve myself from ever filling in another shitter hole again after this. End of the season on Thunder Road, Tony is close by, booming out “Help, help filling shitter holes!” as we slowly pack up camp to leave. I lay back down in my tent, illuminated blue by the sunlight, and hum a few bars of For the Longest Time to myself. My dues are paid.
Stay tuned for more shitter stories, including the time all the tents blew away in a windstorm and all that remained were the seat bases, but bitch, you’ve still gotta shit somewhere.