Lessons in female delicacy

ONE THING I LEARNED about cruising under sail is that women are especially sensitive about doors on toilets. When I decided to take a six-month cruise aboard my 30-foot sloop with my wife and teenage son, it became clear that certain compromises would have to be made.

Now let me say at the outset that I favor simple, robust fittings on a sailboat. I don’t think fancy gadgets make good shipmates. I can get along very well without the trappings of luxury on a small boat.

Nevertheless, when one is planning to live in close confinement with one’s wife and 17-year-old son for a long period of time, certain adjustments, certain fancy gadgets, are called for. Certain standards prevail below which a wife, at least, will not sink, it seems.

One such adjustment concerned our toilet arrangements. The matter first came to light during a weekend afloat, a practice run for Freelance’s 7,000-mile cruise from Africa to America, and this “adjustment” was of such a serious nature that my wife made me record it in the ship’s log, from which I take the following extract:

A special meeting was held in the main saloon of the yacht Freelance at 2000 on Friday.

The business on the agenda was a proposal by the Ship’s Mate “That urgent consideration be given to providing a solid wooden door for the toilet.”

The Skipper pointed out (very reasonably, he thought) that a door was a fancy gadget that would be difficult — nay, almost impossible — to provide.

The Mate said she didn’t care, she wasn’t going cruising with two males without a door on the head.

The Skipper then proposed an amendment, saying that male members of the crew would be prepared to make a solemn promise to repair to the cockpit each and every time the Mate needed to use the ship’s head.

The Mate expressed dissatisfaction with this arrangement, saying she feared it would be impractical on a dark rainy night, for instance, when said male members would be loath to leave a warm and comfortable saloon to stand around in a cold and dripping cockpit.

The Skipper then offered to provide a curtain that would slide across the entrance to the head, thus ensuring the privacy the Mate seemed to require.

The Mate, on a point of explanation, then asked the Skipper for his definition of “privacy.”

The Skipper said privacy was patently present when the occupant of the toilet was invisible to others in the near vicinity.

The Mate said that in her humble opinion, which she knew didn’t count for much, “privacy” also constituted an element of noise-proofing.

The Skipper expressed surprise that ladies made noises in the loo, saying he thought only men did that sort of thing.

The Mate said with some asperity that it was none of his business what ladies did in the loo and would he kindly get on with the meeting?

The Skipper then pointed out that, of the seven yachts of the same class as Freelance with which he was acquainted, not one possessed a door to the toilet. In the confined space of the head, he said, a door could not swing without hitting the bowl, the wash-basin, the towel rail, the toilet-paper holder and the gadget that held the baby-wipe dispenser.

The Mate said she did not care, she wanted a proper door on the loo.

The Skipper, visibly roused, said he thought it a luxury even to have a toilet on a 30-footer, let alone one with a door. Good grief, woman, he could list any number of 35-footers that still cling to the good old bucket-and-chuck-it system. It was just a matter of getting used to it, that was all.

The Mate then called for a vote.

When all those in favor of the Mate’s motion were asked to say “Aye,” the Mate said “Aye.”

When all those against the motion were asked to say “Nay,” the Skipper said “Nay.”

This stalemate was eventually resolved by the Mate, who repeated her earlier threat not to go cruising under any circumstances without a solid wooden toilet door.

The Skipper then declared the meeting closed, and the Mate said if he was planning to have a nightcap at the yacht club, as usual, he had better come back with a concrete plan for a loo door.

*    *    *

Well, the writing was on the wall, of course, as well as in the log. So, with grave misgivings, I set out to design a door for the head. After lots of head-scratching and sketches on the back of yacht-club menus, I managed to make an odd-shaped piece of half-inch marine plywood fit the cut-out in the main bulkhead in the saloon.

I hinged it on one side and cut a small notch so it cleared the bowl of the Lavac toilet. The seat and the lid of the Lavac protruded farther than the bowl, but rather than end up with a door looking like a piece of cheese the rats had nibbled, I opted for the simpler arrangement of lifting the two lids when the door needed to be opened or closed.

When it was finished, the door simply separated the saloon from the forward half of the boat, which included the head, sandwiched between two bulkheads, and the fo’c’s’le.

It was just what the Mate wanted, apparently. “It’s lovely,” she exclaimed — and promptly jammed it against the toilet seat.

“Bit awkward to use,” I pointed out.

“Don’t care,” she said. “It’s lovely.”

Over the months we became accustomed to our eccentric loo door, but we did find it necessary to write out a detailed instruction list for passengers on day-sails. They went like this:

To Close Toilet Door

(1) First move right out of toilet area and stand in FORWARD cabin.

(2) Reach into toilet area and unlatch door from bulkhead.

(3) Lift lid and seat of toilet into upright position.

(4) Remove portable wash basin from drop-down flap. Empty contents (if any) into toilet bowl. Raise drop-down flap to upright position.

(5) Close door and latch against main bulkhead to starboard.

(6) Move into toilet area and read list of instructions for use of toilet.

(7) Use toilet.

(8) When finished, close seacock marked “A.”

To Open toilet door

(1) Move yourself into forward cabin.

(2) Reach into toilet area and unlatch door from main bulkhead.

(3) Wait 30 seconds, or until hissing noise from toilet has ceased, after which toilet seat should be raised.

(4) Check that portable wash basin and flap, if used, are not obstructing movement of door.

(5) Close door and latch against bulkhead to port.

Even after it was sanded and varnished, only a mother could truly have loved our loo door. And yet, after having shared with it some of my most intimate moments, I had to confess a growing affection for it. When you got everything right first time, and it swung closed without knocking anything over or jamming on the seat, you experienced a wonderful glow of satisfaction.

And when you did make the odd mistake, and it stuck fast half-way open, it taught you humility and patience, two qualities much to be admired in sea-going people.

And then there was the fact that it saved our cruise and our marriage. The Mate liked it. That was really all that mattered.

There came a time, in fact, when the Mate gave ladies from other boats in our class guided tours of our loo. They were very envious. Their unthoughtful husbands made them use curtains. I, on the other hand, was much admired for my sensitivity and understanding of the feminine nature, and I naturally took all the credit for thinking of the idea in the first place.

Today’s Thought

An occasional lucky guess as to what makes a wife tick is the best a man can hope for.
Even then, no sooner has he learned how to cope with the tick than she tocks.
— Ogden Nash, Marriage Lines

Tailpiece

A news item in the Walnut Street Gazeout (should be Gazette) says:
“Next Friday night’s concert in the main cell block will be performed by the pop group Heavy Lift, and their supporting group, The Truss.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Where toilets go to die

THE BIG DUMPSTER that sits at the head of the gangway to our marina docks is mercifully hidden from public view by high walls. I say mercifully, because it is flanked at the moment by two old marine toilets, something no mariner of delicate sensitivity would want the public to see.

People put things beside the dumpster, rather than in the dumpster, when they judge the stuff they’re throwing out to have some residual worth, something that might be of use to someone else.

I don’t know what fortune it bodes to have two porcelain heads flanking the dumpster. I have heard that a single ring around the sun bodes rain in 24 hours, and I know for sure that if you see a double ring around the moon it means you’re outside when you should be in bed.

But I also happen to know that a used marine toilet is worth about as much as an ice cube in Alaska. I know this because there was a time when I, too, threw the plumbed head off my 22-foot race boat in favor of the much lighter bucket-and-bag-it system.

I took it down the road to the local marine consignment store.

“I have a porcelain head,” I told the man. “Good working condition.”

He sighed. “Let’s see it,” he said warily.

I led him outside and threw open the trunk of my car. The head crouched there innocently on a piece of blue tarpaulin, clean and bright and trying to look hygienic and attractive.

“OK,” said the man. “Bring it in.”

He guided me through the store and down some stairs to a basement room. And there, to my astonishment, stood rows and rows of pre-owned white porcelain toilets, wall to wall as far as the eye could see. It was like the Arlington National of boating bathrooms.

“This is where marine toilets come to die,” said the man lugubriously, waving an arm at a veritable elephant’s graveyard of maritime plumbing. “Yours might take a while to sell,” he added unnecessarily.

I guess people have given up taking their old toilets there now. They’re just leaving them beside the dumpster. I’m not surprised. It was about 10 years ago that I left my old toilet at the consignment store. I still haven’t had a call saying they have a check for me.

Today’s Thought
Let not the eyes be dry when we have lost a friend, nor let them overflow. We may weep, but we must not wail.
— Seneca, Epistulae ad Lucilium

Boaters’ Rules of Thumb, #46
Streams and currents. A current is a steady and permanent horizontal movement of water, like a river running through the ocean. A tidal stream is also a horizontal movement of water but it varies frequently and regularly in speed and direction according to the state of the tide.

Tailpiece
A VA doctor was examining a man back from a long spell in Iraq.
“Do you pass water normally?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t go more than usual?”
“Um — no, sir.”
“When you go, does it burn at all?”
“Don’t know, sir. Never tried to light it.”

Whiffling and fossicking

I WAS WHIFFLING though a dictionary the other day when I happened upon . . .

“Hold it!” I hear someone cry. “What’s whiffling?”

Deep sigh. Don’t they teach English in school any more? Whiffling is like fossicking, only gentler and less agitated. Fossicking is what fairies do when they’re busily searching for fairy dust under toadstools and fallen leaves. But whiffling is calmly flicking through the pages of a book with one thumb. Gottit? OK, good.

Now, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, as I whiffled through the dictionary I happened upon the word reredorter. Almost pure Latin, of course. It means “behind the dormitory” in a convent or monastery.

In other words, it’s yet another word for a toilet. I was intrigued because I also have a toilet that’s behind the dormitory, but I don’t call it a reredorter. It’s on my boat, and I call it a head. And that got me to thinking about the dozens of words the English language has spawned in place of the simple word toilet — including, I regret, the word john.

In my corner of the Pacific Northwest, when we see someone with his legs crossed and a desperate look on his face, we send him to nearest restroom. Across the border in Canada, they call it the washroom. In England, a gent would approach you with appropriate diffidence and whisper: “I say, old chap, could you possibly direct me to the — er — facilities?”

In Australia and New Zealand they call an outhouse a dunny, which explains their description of a willing girl-friend: “She bangs like a dunny door, mate.”

In South Africa, a man asks where he can point Percy at the porcelain; or sometimes he’ll enquire where he can shake hands with his best friend. Sailors, naturally, want to know where they can pump their bilges.

Behind all these sayings is a virtual lexicon of substitutes for the word toilet, including loo, lavatory (in Britain, the lavatory is the toilet, not the wash basin), Gents’, Ladies’, convenience, comfort station, powder room, pottie, privy, and w.c. (water closet).

The Welsh lower classes seem to regard any reference to the toilet as indelicate. I once was staying in a grand manor in northern Wales when I came across a maid in a passage that led only to the loo.

“Oh, hello Blodwen,” I said, “and where might you be going?”

She replied: “Oh, sir, ’tis been that I have where I was goin’ — ’tis coming back that I am now.”

You’ll notice that we haven’t mentioned the French yet. And we’re not going to. Depraved is the word that comes to mind — right after the word pissoir. How a Frenchman can stand on a busy city sidewalk and tilt his hat to passing ladies while he pees into a urinal I don’t know. And don’t want to. If he had any decency at all he'd use the reredorter.

Today’s Thought
It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
— André Gide

Boaters’ Rules of Thumb #9
Your kedge anchor should be about two-thirds of the weight of the bower. (Kedge — Used for hauling a vessel off when she has gone aground; and to prevent her from fouling her bower. Bower — by ancient tradition, a ship’s principal anchor.)

Tailpiece
“You there, Bill?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t feel no pain or nothin’?”
“Nope.”
“Great. Then I guess I just shot a bear.”

Faeces Afloat, Part 2

IN MY LAST COLUMN we were discussing a little bestselling book called How to Shit in the Woods. Well, let me tell you that doing your jobbies in the woods is a piece of cake compared with using the head on a small sailboat.

In the first place, everyone has to sit down to use the head. Men who need only to pee, and think they can aim accurately while standing up at sea are greatly mistaken. On boats where they have tried, the head smells like a month-old cat litter box. The traditional male pee posture is standing at the leeward shrouds, with one arm around the shrouds for safety. Urban legend says more men are lost this way at sea than any other, but I don’t believe it. It is illegal, of course, to pee overboard within three miles of the coast, and completely forbidden in many eco-sensitive areas closer in. Illegal for a human, that is. Legal for a whale, though. Go figure.

But the main trouble with a boat’s sewage system is that you have to carry the poo from your loo with you. It goes into a holding tank that is carefully hidden from delicate human eyes. And how can you tell when the holding tank is full? Well, when you’re pumping out the loo it gets a bit more difficult to move the handle. So you give it an extra-hard pull and suddenly there’s this kind of dull thud noise. A sort of muffled burp, followed by slopping noises as a murky stream slithers from the holding tank into the bilge. And loud screams from the First Mate in the galley. Big-time problem.

You should, of course, have visited a pump-out station, if you could ever have found one. But it’s embarrassing, because people on shore stand around and watch for boats approaching the pump-out berth. They find it kind of amusing to see the skipper and crew trying to figure out how this particular machine works, which switch does what, and which hose goes where. And if they accidentally switch the pump motor to “blow” instead of “suck” will it explode the crap into their cabin? Such fun, as long as you stand upwind.

Another trouble with boat heads is that they are right there in the main living accommodation. There is not a hint of privacy. Using the head is not for people with delicate susceptibilities. Strange noises from the loo have been known to seriously frighten nervous young ladies, and no boat that I have ever owned was able to overcome this sound-proofing problem.

The whole system is susceptible to blockage in the pipes, of course, and putting things right is a terrible problem, especially if you’re at sea and people are standing around with their legs crossed and panic on their faces. To overcome blockages, some head systems incorporate an electric macerator. A macerator works like your kitchen blender. It makes a frothy poo purée, a sort of crap-à-la-crème, that passes smoothly along the tubes into the dreaded holding tank.

On boats without macerators there is often a large notice in the head that warns landlubbers: “Put nothing down the loo that you haven’t eaten first.” I always think that’s silly. I mean, what about the paper?

There is, however, an alternative to the traditional pump-out head. It’s called a Porta Pottie. It’s really just a large modern chamber pot. But, once again, it has its drawbacks on a boat. You can’t simply yell “Gardy loo!” and hurl the contents into the street, as they used to do in the old days. You have to take it off the boat, smuggle it to a public toilet, and try to pour the contents into the porcelain bowl without alarming the man in the cubicle next door when he hears the worryingly prolonged glug-glug-glug, plop-plop-plop noises you’re making.

Some people who don’t like carrying their loaded chamber pots around in public have now gone over to composting toilets. They place them right there in the head compartment. There are no pipes to clog, no holes in the boat to let in flushing water, and no pumps to break down.

Even with all those advantages, I still can’t stomach the thought of living cheek-by-jowl with growing piles of my old poo rotting away in the corner, being chomped on by millions of starving little bugs. I mean, what if their tiny appetites wane one of these days? What if they get tired of the same old crap, day after day? Now, instead of a Porta Pottie to empty ashore, I’ll be stuck with a whole barrel-load of you-know-what right here on the boat with me.

But maybe I’m attacking the problem from the wrong end, as it were. I have just researched a list of foodstuffs on the Internet. It includes ice-cream, cheese, meat, chips, pizza, hard-boiled eggs, and instant mashed potatoes. And what, you ask, do they have in common? Well, they all cause constipation. Next time I go cruising, I shall put the ship’s company strictly on my new diet. I shall call it the Don’t-Do-It Diet, and come back from my cruise two weeks later with an empty, sweet-smelling holding tank. Now that’s something to aim for.

Today’s Thought
To what purpose is this waste?
— New Testament, Matthew, xxvi, 8

Tailpiece
“What’s your opinion of my new book?”
“It’s absolute drivel.”
“I’m sure it is, but I’d like to hear it anyway.”

A Number Two bestseller

I CAN STILL REMEMBER how shocked I was when I first saw a book called How to Shit in the Woods. I was shocked at the word shit appearing on a book cover, and I was also shocked that anyone would need instructions on how to do a Number Two (as I was taught to call it in childhood) in the woods.

Nevertheless, I overcame my double shock and bought the book. It turned out to be a serious and valuable treatise for hikers and campers on how to avoid polluting our natural water sources. Despite its title, or perhaps because of it, it was a best-seller.

Once I had got used to seeing the bold and honest Anglo-Saxon word shit on a pure white page, my mind naturally turned to plagiarism. I thought of writing a bestseller called How to Shit on a Boat. But my genteel upbringing rebelled at the thought of that title. After a lot of pondering I daringly came up with How to Crap on a Craft. But that was still too vulgar, too plebian, and not half clever enough.

Then I remembered one of my all-time favorite newspaper headlines. After a ship in Durban harbor accidentally discharged thousands of gallons of sewage into the bay, the Sunday Tribune ran a picture of it with the headline caption: THE SHIP THAT LAUNCHED 1,000 FAECES

That was a reverse nod to the classics, of course, and Helen of Troy. So now I had the title of my new book — FAECES AFLOAT — but no ideas about what to put in it, except the fact that nobody but a small-boat sailor knows how difficult it is to do a Number Two at sea when the boat is bouncing up and down and you’re wearing six layers of storm-proof gear and the toilet is in a tiny cabinet the size of a midget’s coffin and you’re feeling seasick.

Only a small-boat sailor understands how profoundly the psyche of sailing is affected by the fact that you have to carry your poo around with you, because you can’t simply pump it overboard any more unless you’re way out on the ocean. You have to hide your Number Twos, along with your Number Ones, in a holding tank. And that holding tank is often furtively situated under your bunk. When you sleep, your head could be six inches from two weeks’-worth of other people’s Number Threes.

There are many other concerns regarding the creation and disposal of human waste on a boat, and decent people mainly don’t talk about them. But now that I’ve got started, I might as well vent my feelings, if you’ll pardon the expression. So watch this space next Friday for Faeces Afloat, Fart 2.
► How to Shit in the Woods, Kathleen Meyer (Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, Calif.)

Today’s Thought
Waste brings woe.
Robert Greene, Sonnet

Tailpiece
“Any Royalty in your family?”
“No, but I had an uncle who was a Peer.”
“Really? I had an uncle with bladder trouble, too."