Up until the point that I was sixteen years old I had never spent very much time away from home. I had a fairly sheltered childhood; the only times I ever spent away from home were either at a relative’s house or accompanying my parents somewhere.
During that sixteenth summer I finally left home and experienced one week of summer amongst a large group of my peers. I had just found a job at a local grocery store and would start soon, and I was going away to summer camp the next day. I felt that the upcoming week signaled I would not be spending the bulk of my summer in the neighborhood as I had in summer’s past.
On the first day of camp, at 4:30 in the morning, I found myself at a church fellowship hall; did I mention this was a church camp? Yeah. We ate eggs, toast and sausage as the church vans pulled into the parking lot to pick up one hundred and fifty teenage campers heading from southwestern West Virginia to the camp’s location: a small, unincorporated town in Eastern Kentucky called Blane. The camp itself was surrounded by thick forest and other greenery, and it was miles to the next town.
The first thing I worried about was getting attacked by a bear because I’d never been that far away from civilization before. The first night of camp was rough. I saw the boys’ camp area for the first time. On the outside, the cabins were simple-looking, yet modern, but on the inside they were bare and colorless. My cabin-mates were cool guys, though; they were about my age and liked the same music I did.
Once the sun set, the only light shining in the pitch black camp was a dim outdoor spotlight hanging on a tree in the middle of the boy’s camp area. The bathrooms were in a bathhouse at the end of the boy’s camp, and if anyone needed to go to the bathroom it involved a dark odyssey to the edge of camp to get to that bathhouse. I woke up an hour after lights out in need of taking a crap. My last day at home I didn’t need to poop, and so I’d forgone it; now I regretted that decision.
I grabbed the cheap flashlight my mom had purchased from Big Lots and pushed back the screen door of the cabin, tripping over many tree roots as I made my way to the bathhouse. I was only a few steps out when the flashlight stopped working - and hasn’t work since, might I add. Stupid flashlight. I entered the bathhouse for the first time and saw five shower stalls on one side of the bathroom and a few sinks, a long mirror and four bathroom stalls on the other. The stalls had curtains for doors. I never understood that. Almost every day that week everyone would be walked in on at least once.
The stall I selected had no toilet paper, so I tried another. The other three other stalls had toilet paper chained to the wall, but every roll was soaked.
This would be a good time to remind you that I’d never been to camp before. Because of this there were some things I didn’t think to bring. I remembered to bring my sleeping bag but not my pillow, I remembered to bring my toothbrush but not toothpaste; and most importantly I did not remember to bring toilet paper. I could have used a shirt to wipe, but I didn’t have any extra clothes with me to where I could afford to lose one. Besides, what a disgusting waste of a shirt it would have been. Once you wipe your ass on a shirt, that shirt is done, forever.
I could only shrug off the unfortunate situation and head back to the cabin without the convenience of a flashlight.
As each day passed the need to crap only increased. Not one person in the camp had a roll of toilet paper with them, and no one else appeared to mind wiping their asses with wet toilet paper. I was too shocked and angry to improvise.
I was also too busy; the camp’s curriculum was stuffed from sunrise to sunset. I suppose this was to keep us from having sinful thoughts or time to chill out and question the demands that we keep ourselves pure. I made a few friends and had a couple laughs despite the depressing week but never once pooped.
It was hardly a week of spiritual rebirth and joy; it was more a week of sexual repression and stress. All I could do was think about how bad I had to shit and how there was no way that was going to happen. It was very hot, too, and that only made my predicament worse.
On the last day the vans brought us home, and I met my dad. He wanted to know if I wanted to go visit my grandparents, and I said, “No. I need to crap sooooo bad.” We went home.
I dropped my belongings throughout the house and hastily moved towards the bathroom, opened the door and sighed in relief; there was dry toilet paper without chains by the toilet. I pulled down my pants and sat down, not thinking about how big this crap was going to be.
I bit my lip and couldn’t help but cry aloud in pain for the next ten minutes as eight days worth of waste was purged from my behind. The premier turd was large enough to cause some bleeding. The blood concerned me at first, but I considered the fact that it had been eight days since my last shit.
It wasn’t as much poop as I expected, as I’d tried not to eat very much. I drank a lot of liquids because it was hot, and that might have been what kept me from absolutely having to crap before leaving camp. As hard as it may be for some to imagine someone going eight days without pooping, it’s true. I would never do it again, though.
For some reason I went back the next year; but I remembered my pillow, toothpaste and most importantly, a roll of toilet paper.
