Norway (part D)

A limited reservoir of daylight precluded us. Still within the basins of fjords, the humble human intellect knew where they were. They marveled at the history, the epic nature of the geology surrounding them. One could feel how time had been a constant for eons, for short days and long nights. They pictured viking ships shrinking in the mists to rhyme, to coincide with the subtle calms that led to oceans from sublime bodies of watered-down time. We were in Flam, Norway at a public pool.

I was never much of a putzer, a frolicker in pools. I swam seriously, for exercise, mostly and the dunkings, splashing and cannon-balls were not my speed. Eventually the pool was ours, cleared for, or because of, our troop. Some of us had not showered in two or four days. So the water was filtered through its chlorine. It grew a grayish slick surface hue. They splashed on and frolicked or putzed like people their age, older with younger scouts. I sat on the side with the fathers, watching the last of the female publics towel off and exit through chain-linked gates.

Eventually I lost interest in watching what was childish fun, listening to the fathers timidly feudally argue points on what to do with the rest of the trip. Ideas floated around in seruptition. Not one elder knew really what to do, they tried to politicize our 400$ per-person trip. I left my comfortable pool chair to find a bathroom. It was rustic and rural. The area we were in was heavy with pines named for the country of origin. Places to pee were everywhere I turned. I needed something more, a place I could take a little longer, not risk being caught in a helpless and undignified position. I have only shit in the woods once and recall it as the most humiliating, trepidacious, aesthetically displacing experience in my life. The chore is inevitable for most of humanity apparently. Much thought has gone into where and how to successfully accomplish it with minimal pain or humiliation. So much so that a book, How to Shit in the Woods (1989) was written on the subject. It is something I since have tried very hard to avoid having to do. On scout weekends, on real camping sites void of outhouses, latrines, or even “slammers,”I kept it inside. Rather then find the cross-boughs of a tree, sitting in them praying they did not break, blindly grabbing for a fistful of leaves nearby, my colon became the student of negative reinforcement. I could go weekends without feeling the urge to purge the way station for our chili-mac.

Even in the BWCA, long after scouts, I sub-consciously suppressed my colonic desires. There were the aforementioned slammers, a wooden box upon which one sat to shit in the box, not the woods in a literal sense, in any sense of the word. There you were, trying, pushing, exercising muscles you hoped you would not have to for the duration of the trip. Nature's elements were there in all their luridness, seeing you at your most humanly functioning. There was usually a half a roll of TP left on a slab of cement before you, respected by other campers as the essential Geneva conventional item it was. You completed your human evolution, stood up, pulled up your pants, let the lid fall, thus sending a SLAM echoing for a half-mile radius.

There were foreign elements to consider. I knew my current situation, my seclusion among the pines. I could get lost in the green needled desolation of nature, the odd discovery of a three seated latrine. Like everything I had seen in Norway it was clean, with one lacking, TP. I settled down for a civilized movement, like European clockwork had been set ahead for one hour. I heard the putzes and revelry of my troop lasting the daylight, beating the night for a moonlight serenade of calm gray bubbled pool water. I considered our time left in Norway, my dark hair, my darker skin among all the Norwegian sons. How had I blended in so far? I was the odd man out always, and usually ultimately played that card to the deck's favor. That's the only way I can assess what happened next.