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 The Joy Of GrooversPosted 10.26.2007 by blown o-ring (10)
I live in one of the more mountainous states way out west -- a state with a lot of hiking trails that need constant repair work. There are a number of volunteer group that work on these trails, and I am a member of one such group. Several years ago, I was out on a week-long project way back in the hills, where I was using these ingenious toilets called "groovers".
A groover is a .50-calibre ammo can with a plastic holding tank fitted inside. It's got a six-inch-wide hole on top so you can affix a removable bowl and toilet seat. These things are incredible -- so comfortable you might fall asleep on the thing and fall over. That wouldn't be good, however, because the tank is open, and you would undoubtedly be awash in something a little less putrid than a dead skunk (and twice as sticky). Groovers got their name from the fact that the first versions didn't have seats, and when you squatted over them, a nice set of red grooves was embossed into your behind. Over the years, though, a host of river raft guides and other sanitation engineer types worked some magic, and the modern field toilet was born. As I said earlier, I was out for a week with about thirty-five people, working on trails at altitude. We'd packed in eight of these groover tanks, and they were doing fine for us. Because of the dense forest cover, we don't generally have to set up a screen or tent to hide the toilet. We let the trees do the hiding. As a result, all sorts of interesting animals, large and small, are seen on a regular basis. One day a moose actually walked right by one of the groovers while a friend of mine was sitting there communing with nature. We've even had a black bear run past one of our toilets. Fortunately he didn't stop to use the facilities. (Bear poo, by the way, is often runny, black, and unpleasant). At the end of the week we wrapped up the project, capped the crappers, and hauled them down to the trucks for the drive out to civilization. We generally take the groovers (or "rocket boxes" -- so-called because they often explode if they're full and left out in the sun for several days) to the local dump station that is most often used for camping trailers to clean them out. (That experience is a story for another time). But as fate would have it, one of the full boxes got misplaced, and ended up not getting dumped. I guess somebody got lazy when we got back to our tool warehouse, because the box got placed on the shelf. As per Murphy's Law, nobody seemed to remember that the box was full, and so it sat for eight months until the next season. Our warehouse at that time was a corrugated tin shed. Unheated. As a result, the box contents froze, thawed, froze, and thawed until they were discovered the next year. When the box was opened there was a large, loud, splattering offgassing -- but, surprisingly, very little odor. Someone had apparently inoculated the tank with a digestive enzyme solution that seemed to have done its job well -- a little anaerobic cooking had left a thick stew with a slightly sweet garlic odor. No one was brave enough to put the box in their car to run it down to the dump station twenty miles away, so the box was left, uncapped, for several more months out back behind the warehouse. The arid climate in our area desiccated the contents sufficiently enough to yield a brick-like mass of sludge, the likes of which would make a sewer plant worker weep for joy. If there were ever a weirder experiment conducted with a groover and its contents, I would be surprised. Although, now that I think about it, we did have a horse spook a pack mule several years ago. The mule, carrying a load of tools and a full crapper, went on a rampage in a heavily wooded area. The tools were recovered, but not the crapper. Which means somewhere in the high forests of Colorado, there is a fully-loaded .50-caliber ammo box laying in the cool shadows of a subalpine fir stand, just waiting for some unwary hunter to find it and discover the treasure within. The mule lost that box six years ago. To this day, if I hear on the news about a spontaneous forest fire starting out in the wilds somewhere, I think of that box. Incidentally, you haven't lived until you've taken a dump in the open woods with a fresh, cool breeze blowing between your legs and a hummingbird landing on the bill of your baseball cap. To live well is to crap well... so crap well and live well! Post new comment
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