Beautiful Scenery, Ugly Task

I took this beautiful, scenic picture on my way to dump two weeks’ worth of poop into a giant hole in the ground. 

Let me provide some context. For about six months a few years ago, I lived off grid in a trailer in the woods in Fiddletown, CA. Living off grid was all the rage in the blog world, and I wanted to give it a try. I was looking for a place to live, and ran across an ad on Craigslist. I called the owner, drove to the property and looked around. I was sure it was too good to be true but after talking to him about what I would need to get set up, I decided to go for it. And then spent the next month living at my sister’s house while we had the flood of the decade. I couldn’t drive out to the ranch in my little Ford Focus without getting stuck in the mud, much less assemble my solar set up in the pouring rain. So I waited. Finally the weather cleared up and my brother came up with me to help me set up my solar panels. They were big and unwieldy, and he is a handyman so he taught me a lot that day. I got everything set up and moved in. It was very exciting and a little scary at first. There were a lot more spiders than I would have liked, but I found that even though they freaked me out, I could deal with it. And there was a nice family right down the hill who I could interact with and get advice from, so it was a pretty nice set up. I only lived there part time in between house sitting jobs, which could be from a day to a week at a time. I had running water from the well and electricity from my solar panel, but the pilot light wouldn’t work and my landlord wasn’t that interested in fixing it so I had no heat, hot water, refrigerator or freezer. I had a nice little propane stove that I could heat water in and take sponge baths so it was just fine. When I turned on the stove and lit the flame, the spiders that had been living down in the burners all came running out. That was entertaining. And every day I found fresh mouse poop in my kitchen drawers. So I made sure to clean every utensil before I used it. I had a toilet in the bathroom and was told that urine was ok to drain out but feces and toilet paper had to go in a bucket lined with ash and straw. I figured it would smell pretty bad but after I covered my deposit with a generous amount of ash and straw, I found that it didn’t smell at all. Which brings us to the picture. When the bucket got relatively full, I would have to take it on a fairly long hike up a trail which then disappeared into a meadow. The owner showed me once when I visited but by the time I had to make the first trip I had forgotten where it was. So the little boy from the family was kind enough to take me. He wasn’t very old but he was whip smart. He helped his dad and the owner with all sorts of projects. Once we got to the top of the hill, there were two holes the owner had dug out with a tractor. For some reason, even though he had over 50 acres of land, he had chosen to place these holes right next to a neighbor that disapproved of this practice. So the boy told me I had to be very quiet so I didn’t attract the attention of the neighbor. Great. The other thing I learned very quickly is that the sides of the holes were sloped, so I had to be extremely careful not to lose my footing and fall in myself! There was no cell signal up there and the holes were easily ten feet deep, so that would have been a bad situation. I managed to get a foothold far enough in so that my poop and toilet paper went down into the hole, and returned to my trailer with my empty bucket. Fortunately, I didn’t spend a lot of time there between jobs so I only had to make that trip a few times.