Plentiful Poop

Pretty porta potties, outhouse disasters, and the off grid toilet I love

One of the things I appreciate about off-grid living is the mindfulness one must have of what goes into being on the planet.

Now, I love being able to walk into my house in town and push a button to get cool air, turn on the tap and have almost immediate hot water, and know I can have every light on in the house without wondering if they will last all night. Ah, the luxury! The things we humans who live plugged into the grid take for granted! The bliss of a hot shower and a cold refrigerator!

And there is something so grounding and real about being aware of the limitations and concrete realness of resources when you have a 250-gallon gravity fed water tank to wash dishes with, a battery charged by the sun to run your lights, a refrigerator powered by a 10-gallon propane tank, and heat from wood you cut yourself and fed to the wood stove throughout the night to stay warm.

I dig it. And I love sharing this lifestyle of presence and place with others.

The other thing we don't think about is what happens after we flush the toilet. Bye bye, poop! Off it goes to some mysterious place, out of sight and invisible.

But spending time in rustic places changes ones relationship with poop. Because it has to go someplace.

In the beginning….

Our first outhouse was an old porta potty * scavenged from an arroyo** where it had been dumped.

Master builder and beloved Franklin found it one day while out for a walk, and later drove his truck into the arroyo to pick it up. He patched a few holes and presented it to me as a gift. The best!

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* Porta potty: A portable or mobile toilet (colloquial terms: thunderbox, porta-john, porta-potty or portaloo) is any type of toilet that can be moved around.

** An arroyo is a Southwest desert thing: a dry sandy gully or mini canyon that becomes a raging river when it rains, then is back to a dry gully / baby canyon almost immediately afterwards.

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One clear winter day he loaded the porta potty into the back of his pickup truck and drove the it 2 ½ hours up to the land.

And got stuck.

Approximately two feet away from the property line.

Let's paint the picture:

Man who grew up in New Mexico and knows mud.

Driving a four-wheel drive truck.

What could go wrong?

Mud could go wrong. Very wrong.

This mud is probably 70 percent clay and 20 percent glue, and 10 percent trickster, and Franklin spent three hours trying to get free in a multitude of creative ways, only to get more stuck.

The neighbor, who I'm like to imagine was watching out his kitchen window down the hill and chuckling at the newcomer, finally took pity and sent his son to pull the truck out.

The porta potty lay abandoned for a bit on the side of the mud pit until it was safe to drive without fear of getting sucked in by the hungry mud monster.

Eventually that first porta potty was rescued and then joined by a second used porta potty we bought for $100.

Cut out the bottom and wala! A rustic outhouse in the woods.

Plastic porta potties are not so attractive, but dang are they easy to set up and they make for great poop places. All you have to do is dig a hole.

Right? Just dig a hole?

Well, not exactly.

First, before the porta potty disaster story I'm going to share with you, let me share this:

I'm convinced we have the most empowering and sexy outhouses in the galaxy. Put pens into outhouses with women learning how to pitch tents and use power tools and build things and here is what you get:

Our first porta potty outhouse hole was dug in a flat area where an old shed once stood. It was hard digging with lots of rocks, but the hole was about four feet deep and served us for a couple of years before it started filling up and getting gross.

Along the way I discovered some poop tricks: after everyone left after a work party or workshop and we were closing up for the winter I would sprinkle baking yeast or dump yogurt into the hole, add water, and then stir it all up with a long stick. The yeast / good bacteria would help breakdown the solid matter.

Another poop trick: putting ashes or sawdust or dirt on top of poop to keep it from smelling. I've also heard of people sprinkling lime in their outhouse hole (the mineral, not the fruit.)

Eventually, though, the hole needed to be filled in and the outhouse moved to another location.

Disaster strikes

Last summer one of our work party projects was to move the porta potty outhouses.

We were quite pleased with ourselves that a neighbor had used his tractor and backhoe to dig us a lovely trench which was about 4 feet deep by two feet wide and 6 feet long. We dug it out even further and prepped it to receive the crown of our two side-by-side portapotty outhouses.

It was nestled back in the trees, close to where the tent area is. Two of us mudded and rocked the back and sides to keep water from coming in. We built a little curved rock wall in the front, with the idea to put a little fence up to create more privacy.

All went well until the second or third huge storm of the year. One morning after the rain I visited the outhouse, only to discover that our new deep and wide hole was now filled almost to the top with water and, um other floaty things.

Well, no worries, I thought. The water will percolate into the ground.

Which it did not. See: truck stuck in clay story above. The clay basically acted as a charming swimming pool liner.

When I returned to the land in September after traveling to Europe for the summer, there was still an impressive amount of standing water in the outhouse hole.

We knew we were going to have to move the outhouses once again. Damn.

But where to put them? Where was a space where the water would not flood in, that was close, and private?

The answer: the before-our-time-probably--early-1980s-outhouse spot.

It was a flattened area on an incline, a mostly filled in hole around which we had cleaned up a truckload or two of material from a few years ago.

So Franklin got out the shovel and started digging.

I was hoping for buried treasure, but all that was unearthed from that old shit hole (which was now an old soft dirt hole) was flattened, rusted spray paint cans.

While Franklin shoveled I went to run an errand. When I came back an hour and ½ later only his head and shoulders peeked up over the hole; most of his 6'2” body was below the surface.

He then used wood beams milled from our land to build the base and a little deck, and we carefully tipped each porta potty over onto long boards, and then six of us carried them one at a time, like caskets, to their new home.

The new hole was blessed with poop at our last retreat, and the view is exceptional: from the potty if you keep the door propped open you have a vista down towards the creek.

Eventually we will build a deluxe wooden outhouse. But I'm quite fond of our graffiti covered recycled porta potties.

And finally: off grid toilet I love

For anyone who is building off-grid or lives on the road: I love our Separett toilet in the new bathhouse.

Let me tell you about it!

We have the Separett Villa 9215 AC/DC 12V Urine Diverting High Capacity Waterless Composting Toilet.

When you sit down, a panel opens. Urine is funneled into an area that pipes it out to the ground (we dug a fairly shallow hole to drain the urine into and will bury the pipe properly in the spring. ) The poop goes into a separate area (Separett, get it?!) which has a container and a bag.

It does need a battery to run a tiny fan, but the energy draw is small. We have our smallest Yeti / Goal Zero battery hooked up to one solar panel which keeps the fan going all day once we shifted it from AC/DC to 12-volt.

Because the liquid is separated from the solid and a fan blows over it constantly there is no smell. Like, truly no smell, even in a small space. Then when it is full, which takes a family of four about a month, you pull the bag and throw it away or compost. I’m nerdily excited to do research around composting human poop and feeding the land. #funprojects

Here is a 3 1/2 minute video what those sexy mamas look like, and how they work if you are curious:

One day may you come visit New Mexico and sit on the Separett throne or read the graffit in our porta potty chambers!

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