...oh shit...
“oh shit it's shit”
-Stephen King-
PART ONE :: A SHITSHOW
How long could you live inside an outhouse?
In 1994, 4 years before Mr. Beast was even born to share monetized human experiments on youtube, a 33 year Floridian yoga enthusiast named Jane Swithy answered an ad posted in the Tallahassee Democrat offering $500 per day to anyone willing to live in an outhouse.
The contest was planned by an eccentric millionaire watch salesman named Dr. Henry Olson. Olson, a balding gray-browed ex-professor of economics at the University of Florida spent much of his later years spending his riches on human endurance experiments he organized clandestinely through word of mouth and local classified sections in various Florida city newspapers. Success in business and academics left Olson craving the larger conquests of innovation, celebrity and notoriety.
Jane was chosen as the competitor from a pool of 14 different contestants, aged 16 to 68, who had found the advertisement beneath a sales posting for an 1986 Buick [only 140K miles] and an adoption listing for a calico cat farm near Fort Braden.
Her preparation for the contest included a 7 day silent meditation retreat at a nearby Woodville temple, and 4 weeks of eating all of her daily gluten free vegan meals alone in her bathroom, spending 16 hours each day practicing a Sukhasana pose on the toilet seat. She hoped to last at least half a year in the outhouse, saving enough money to purchase a 800 sq. foot oak paneled dance and yoga studio on Orange avenue near Grassy Lake.
The news cycle promoted the event with growing enthusiasm, a special interest story to pit against the din of local excitement for back to back University of Florida football championships. The rules were such that you were not allowed to leave the outhouse at any point during the contest. Food would be provided twice daily per dietary needs and clothing changes would be provided on only an as needed basis (how this was defined was left open to interpretation in the small print of the 60 page contest disclaimer Jane would have to sign before participating).
Exit from the facilities would be immediate failure and payout would be capped only at total days spent in the abode. Jane brought a backpack of toiletries and 10 books on religion and enlightenment. She had incense matches, a reading flashlight, 20 AA batteries and a friendship rosary her guru had gifted her at a Vermont Jivamukti retreat two years prior.
2 days into the contest Ms. Swithy was forcibly removed from the outhouse. A pending Atlantic ocean hurricane closing in on the city forced local authorities to shut down the event. Jane, the city, and Dr. Olson were all greatly disappointed to lose out on such an opportunity. But their loss turned to relief when two days later the outhouse was violently upended by 156 mph winds and a sewage stream of gators flooded the property. The outhouse would never be rebuilt.
Olson gave Jane $10,000 and an annual stipend for her yoga studio as an appreciation for her determination, promotions and effort. The event had brought him the celebrity he was seeking, and enough notoriety to plan 23 more events in the area before he passed away from a genetic defect he had left untreated.
Jane Swithy called her studio The Olson Outhouse in his honor. She hosts a monthly hot yoga event where the feces of local fauna are brought in to steam alongside the sweaty stretched limbs of yogis. This type of yoga is called external fecal rejuvenation. It is said that this type of exercise can bring ten plus years of youth to your skin.
Isn’t it amazing what shit can do for someone.
“It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.”
-Haruki Murakami-
PART TWO :: WILD SHIT
The first Friday of 2024 I walked the Dunn trail to Graham trail to the West Ridge trail to the Baccharis trail and back onto the Dunn. Along the hike my trailmates and I reflected on all the shit we had done in 2023. One had made a podcast, one had begun to write weekly.
It was a delightful brisk tramp filled with wet dead green leaves and spotted banana slugs tucked into the corners of our path. We made words over methods of music, wild mushrooms, but more than anything, we picked up bag after bag after bag after bag of dog shit.
I own two dogs. Or rather I raise two dogs. Or maybe I just live with two dogs. And there are really only a handful of things one must do to own, raise or live with dogs.
Love them.
Feed them.
Bath them.
Watch Guy’s Grocery Games and Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives with them.
Pick up their shit.
You are the Don of your dog’s doo-doo-doings. On this trail I passed pile upon pile, bag after bag after bag after bag of shit. I watched a couple walk one thousand yards ahead of their chihuahua leaving tiny tootsie rolls. I saw a runner completely ignore his doberman pinching a loaf.
To a dog leaving a shit on a trail is second nature, that is where they shit. To a human who cares for that dog, leaving that shit is just being shitty. Neglection of that obligation can only mean one of three things. You are lazy. You think the world looks better with shit on it. Or that you are a lazy piece of shit.
The trails of the Oakland hills are winding wooded wonderlands. yet week after week, year after year, I come back to this trail and find pile after pile, bag after bag of shit left behind. Walking these trails you can see god’s hands massaging earth’s ass and man’s mind making turds all over it. To what do we owe ourselves to care for the shit of those we care for?
As I pick up the shit some other shit left behind that their little shit made, I realize I am both garbageman and caregiver. The piles in my paws become piles of percipience as I toss them into the juniper green trash cans standing next to the newly installed self cleaning bathrooms at the head of our hike. Holding someone else’s shit I can feel their unawareness and I become aware of my own. When I throw that shit out I can clear both of our minds.
“If you start to smell some of the shit, you start smelling all of the shit.”
-Doug Stanhope-
PART THREE :: NO SHIT
In 2018 I met a man named Jason in a logging town on the east side of the Sierra mountains. He was walking the Pacific Rim Trail for his 30th year, having hiked it every year since he was 10 years old. Jason was a real stone mason, from a family of stone masons who lived at the foot of Mount Shasta. He called himself Jason the Mason, because it rhymed and was true. His work afforded him 6 months of freedom every year to walk the trail. Before he invited us to go get nude and warm our taints in a hot spring with him, he remarked on the changes the trail had seen in his life.
The release of the Reese Witherspoon film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Wild”,1 a telling of her heroic walking of the PCT trail, brought with it an increase of novice backpackers. They would start their two month long treks with best intentions, paperbacks in hand, and end it in two weeks time, trash on trail, tents rumpled behind the corner of rocky pine piles.
Below Jason’s feet at the local supply bar were two bags of trash, one his own, and one of that day’s mess from the trail leg he had just finished rustling. His philosophy was that if you see trash on a trail you have to pick it up, otherwise you are leaving behind an excuse for someone else to trash that space even more. Our environment reflects itself and ourself. If you don’t want to be shit, then you have no choice but to remove the shit you find in your life’s path.
He said that there is no past unless you want there to be one. You can fill your backpack with only the future, and live life eating apples from the trees in front of you. And while he was living off the fish he caught on the trail (and beer he bought at this bar), he was focused on progress so that he might transgress to an egress. But I digress, which might be why, stuck on paths filled with other people’s [dog’s] shit, I too felt obligated for their removal.
A childhood of trauma and the death of her mother from cancer. An adult life self medicated with anonymous sex, heroin and abortion. Cheryl Strayed walked the Pacific Rim Trail to leave her own shit behind. After 94 days she crossed the Bridge of the Gods, and after seeing a red fox who had been following her, she finally fully abandoned the psychic load of shit she carried, starting life anew.2
She wrote a book about all that shit, which became a movie about that shit, which led to a bunch of shit’s leaving shit behind for this stoney rhymed hiking man to pick up. Jason the Mason was collecting their shit to throw it away. But the lessons he threw at me are just the type of shit I want to carry with me throughout my life's hike. Pretty wild.
“I’m never gonna do a shit movie, because I’ve got my modeling to support me.”
-Milla Jovovich-
PART FOUR :: TALKIN’ SHIT
What should we do with our own shit?
How we clean our asses after flopping out our fools gold can tell us a lot about how we might live our life. Do I stand or sit? Toilet paper, wet wipe or maybe I bidet? Clean front to back, tirly-whirly to ass-crack, or vice versa?
Our reaction to a defecation is a demonstration of our actualization. A stander checks their TP’s brown level before they flush away the day’s mess. They need to know what they have done, and when they are done, and how much they have done. Material reality is important to them.
Sitters on the other hand, the folks who wipe the same every time (front to back and drop), are folks content knowing that little likely changes. They are content in the process and have no need for excretive epiphany. They are the true [poo] believers.
Wet-wipers are pampered. Non-wipers disgusting. And the people who hose their holes are supposedly life’s most civilized rascals. Personally, I like to squeeze seltzer in my asshole because I am a clown.
Some people just want to wipe all their shit away. A trail runner trail running for senate in Santa Cruz recently posted some shit online about the people who camp and drunk drugs on the trail of his morning routine. To him they are shit and they need to be cleaned up. Yet when I asked him what he was doing to assist these folks, he said it was not his job to do anything but shame them.
What a shame. What a shit.
Life is a shared environment. No matter how cavernous your castle, your shit still soaks down the same sewers and streams as the rest of society. You can’t wash your hands of the problems of the world without securing some soap first [possibly made by the peasants you piss on].
Our shit just might help someone.
Our healthy shit can help someone else’s unhealthy shit become healthy. A $3000 fecal transplant can cure any of a number of diseases from Colitis, to IBS, to even MS, autism or depression.3 That’s expensive shit, but how incredible that by sharing our shit we might save someone else’s life and/or have our own life be saved?
“He is so rich, he has no room to shit.”
-Marcus Aurelius-
PART FIVE :: UP SHIT CREEK
In 1990 a 22 year old man named Christopher Johnson McCandless renamed himself Alexander Supertramp and hiked his way across the US for two years all the way into Alaska. With no cash or credit cards, but plenty of moxie and romance, he hobo hopped and hitchhiked the southwest. His story was captured in the book and film “Into The Wild”. 4
As with Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” memoir, the story of McCandless inspired many hikers to follow his path. In his avatar they saw freedom, rebellion, and the great dream of adventure and heroic individuality. After finally making it to the Denali wilderness, McCandless became trapped by a glacier engorged river. He was 67 pounds, surviving off of only seeds and roots, when he passed of poison or starvation in an abandoned bus 114 days into his final hike.
In the years following his death many hikers tried to cross the same engorged Teklanika river which left McCandless trapped in that bus drawing hash marks on a piece of paper. The “magic bus 142”, as his tomb had come to be known, became a public nuisance. In 2020, after 15 rescues and at least two deaths, it was airlifted and sent to become a museum exhibit at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.5
Bus 142 had been deposited on the Stampede trail sometime after World War II. Miner’s had converted it to a temporary living space with a bed frame and a steel stove. Over the years hunters, trappers, wanderers and fishermen used the bus as a shelter from the rain and bears of the wild Alaska. The unprepared McCandless was likely gifted at least an extra month or two of life with help of this shelter instead of just a tent and trail.
To some McCandless was the shit he left behind, a confused man whose belief in himself put others in danger and glamorized unpreparedness. To others he is the shit, embodiment of the feral human need for freedom and exploration. John Krakauer, the reporter who wrote “Into The Wild” felt McCandless was attempting to be “the first to explore a blank spot on the map”, and that he accomplished this feat by just getting rid of the map.
I’m mainly wondering where he shit for 114 days. How did he wipe?
One man’s shit is another man’s cure for depression. Good shit can make bad shit good. You can leave your shit behind [for someone else to pick up] or take it with you. With care and thought our shit might offer someone else life. Cheryl Strayed, Christopher McCandless and Jane Swithy all saw the shit in their life as an opportunity to start anew. Their shit helped them live their truest lives.
Except for Ms. Swithy. I totally made all that shit up.
“Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being.”
-Antonin Artaud-
FOOTENOTES
https://www.cherylstrayed.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_(2014_film)
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/25202-fecal-transplant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(film)
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2021/10/30/bus-142-finds-its-final-resting-place/
Your made up story was my favorite part. I think I would rather live in the world of your mind than reality. And this, "glamorized unpreparedness" must be the two most accurate and descriptive words of the modern world I've ever heard.
What a nice recap of our time together! ;)