Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [88]
Then at four o’clock we beached the rafts on a sandy, pine-studded inlet and went ashore for the night. Each of us was given a bag with a tent in it and told to pick out a campsite.
Now Ashley was back, glaring at me as I realized with embarrassment that the assemble-the-tent portion of my previous camping festivities had always handled by a guy. “You’re probably too big of a ninnyhammer to put a tent together,” taunted Ashley from her perch atop a rock, never offering to help. But of course, when taken a step at a time, assembling a tent was simply putting the end of one thingy into the front of another thingy. Relieved as I was to learn I could do it as well as the others, I also now found myself feeling grateful to all those boyfriends over the years who volunteered to do it for me. Whoever had convinced men to incorporate tedious tasks like this into their macho display, deserved a very special citation.
Alone in my tent later, breathing in eau de musty, wet canvas raincoat, I peeked out the front flap to take in my view. Our campground was dotted with wet clothing hung out to dry on nearby trees and bushes, making it look like a tsunami recovery area. It had been a fun day, but I confessed to Ashley I would go home right then if it were an option. Tired and sunburned, I missed my dogs, and I couldn’t relax because I hadn’t picked a level spot for my tent’s foundation. This was going to be a bit like trying to sleep on the front steps to my house.
As dinnertime approached, I became increasingly aware that there was also another reason I couldn’t relax. It was time to confront the diciest portion of any camping experience: waste elimination. The camping trips of my youth had always involved simply wandering off into the woods with a flashlight, a shovel, and a roll of toilet paper. But not anymore.
From inside my tent, I could see a steady, antlike stream of ladies heading down the path to “the baño.” For the next few days, bathroom breaks were all going to be a question of timing. There was only one baño for the entire group. At the entrance to the path, one big round rock on top of another one signaled that the baño was ocupado. That rock rarely moved.
The baño was the portable toilet our group carried with us wherever we went, because the state park that contains this stretch of the Green River insists that campers pack out everything they pack in. More toiletty in appearance than a simple hole in the ground, the baño had a seat and most of the other elements of an outhouse, sans walls. But given that the baño had been riding the rapids for years, it was to the ordinary outhouse what a Formula One race car was to the family sedan.
To make our encounter as pleasant as possible, the guides all developed a knack for placing the baño in the most scenic of locations. Tonight it was sitting on a level area a hundred yards down a little tree-lined path surrounded by pine boughs; tomorrow it would be nestled between a couple of boulders with a distant view of the moonlight on the river. After one adapted to the idea of sitting outside, alone, in the middle of the night with one’s pants down, it was a little like going to the bathroom in a painting by William Turner. Of course, the scenic aspect of the baño succumbed over time to a certain sensory je ne sais quoi. “You learn not to look or think,” Gabby explained about performing baño duty, which included cleaning and transport. “I still dry-heave every day.”
Tonight’s baño contemplation was interrupted by Susan Ann, a saltier version of the middle-aged Joan Baez, now more New Age priestess than ethereal psychedelic flower child. She was calling for the group to join her in a circle down at the beach. Since the baño was a dream that had yet to materialize for me, I headed down to Susan Ann’s gathering in time to hear her open with the sentence “I really like circles.