The day I learned to burn poop, I was sipping a wine spritzer aboard Southern Lifestyles, the houseboat of a real estate developer.
The spritzer had reached my bladder, and I squirmed to nudge my husband. Our boat, docked several slips away by the small cruisers, didn’t offer a working toilet. I needed to find a spot to relieve myself in the water, and I didn’t want to explain my predicament to a houseboat-owning tycoon.
Relieving oneself at sea is rarely dignified. Even luxury cruisers offer heads — the nautical name for toilets — that regurgitate anything larger than Kleenex. Richard, the captain of Southern Lifestyles, was proud, however: he boasted plans to install an incinerating toilet.
He described incinerary flushing with the flair of a pastry chef lighting bananas foster.
“You go,” he explained, presumably referring to bodily functions, “and with the push of a button, it incinerates everything inside. Just turns it to ashes.” It would cost him a mere $800.
Since my bladder was nagging me, as was the fact that my husband had refused to replace our defunct toilet, the flaming toilet piqued my interest.
“So…” I chose my words carefully, more accustomed to talking about poop with other mothers of toddlers than with wealthy boat owners, ” How long does it take to fill up with…ashes? And how do you get the ashes out?”
“That’s the best part,” Richard answered, leaning forward and carefully balancing a cigar well above the upholstery. “You just toss it overboard. Marvelous, isn’t it?” Then he leaned back and flicked cigar ashes over the rail as if to demonstrate.
I stared at the cigar for an unblinking moment, trying to meld Richard-the-real-estate-tycoon with the man who looked forward to tossing his own poop overboard.
I made a mental note to avoid any wafting ashes if I relieved myself in the waters below Southern Lifestyles.
I felt a blooming kinship with Richard, though, like two parents who could, years later, sit back and laugh about the days their babies screamed with colic. Maybe my husband and I weren’t just too poor, or too cheap, to own a decent boat toilet. Maybe all boaters share the burden of an awkward poo.
When my husband and I purchased our first cabin cruiser, a water-worn 1977 Trojan Express in Arkansas, I gazed at the toilet with hands clasped in anticipation. We had never owned a boat with a toilet. No more zooming to the dock with a cramping gut. No more peeing in the lake in a bikini.
My inaugural flush, however, blew the head’s fuse. After a long first weekend aboard, multiple flushes, and four blown fuses, my husband informed me that my bodily habits were not fuse worthy.
We eventually upgraded to a used, but newer, Maxum 2700 SCR, a cruiser with the Taj Mahal of boat heads. Sparkling white fiberglass stretched to a six-foot ceiling, and a private porthole allowed sea gazing from its throne.
It didn’t matter than no one above a size 14 could squeeze through the entry door, or that squatting required bracing one hand against the wall, slinging one arm over the sink, and lowering in perfect symmetry to avoid banging a hip into the electrical panel. It was a sparkling, clean, working, fuseless toilet.
Flushing, however, was less than graceful. Muscular plunges forced lake water into the bowl, and reverse muscular plunges delivered it to a holding tank. A small sticker above the head indicated you could press a button to “macerate solids” which I suspect is the boating industry’s elitist spin on “grinding poop.”
The process felt something like giving CPR to an unresponsive patient while standing in an unplugged refrigerator. The head must not have liked the process either, the entire time screaming an ear-grating eeeh-haw eeh-haw eeeh-haw….
Presumably, our dock mates never realized why, every few hours, and more often on a day that involved beer, it sounded like I was in the cabin beating a donkey.
Then the head rebelled. It regurgitated water from the holding tank, leaving a bowl of murkish water that scented our boat like a campsite bathroom on the 4th of July. My husband, who had never been fond of waste floating somewhere in the bowels of his beloved boat, fiddled mysteriously with the toilet for an hour, then proclaimed it unfixable and off-limits.
Determined to not return to lake-peeing, I mastered the art of peeing in a cup. Peeing in a cup is possible, but challenging, and seems fundamentally wrong for a person with at least enough money to buy a (used) cabin cruiser in the first place.
My mood had dampened earlier that summer when another Maxum, shinier and newer than ours, docked beside us. I could see it through the bathroom porthole as I straddled my cup, knowing the wife of its owner was possibly, at that very moment, sitting on a working toilet.
Sometimes I misplaced the pee cup, so I’d grab another. This set in motion a gradual depletion of drinking cups, a problem my husband suspected was passive aggressive sabotage. One morning, he peered out the cabin door to ask, “What’s happened to all our cups?”
“Oh,” I answered, contemplating for a minute. “I think I’ve peed on all of them.”
He looked at me as if I’d morphed into a dog.
Perhaps I had resorted to animalistic behavior, but it was on the night Richard taught me how, if I spent $800, I too could burn poop, I felt the calm realization that boaters, rich and poor, sacrifice some comfort in order to spend nights being gently rocked by waves.
That same night, after returning from the leather and teak-drenched Southern Lifestyles and settling on the familiar and soft seat of our cruiser, I heard it. Eeeh-haw……eeeh-haw…..
I searched the bobbing gunwales, trying to locate the source.
Eeeh-haw…eeeeh-haw…eeeh-haw!
The sound grew to a squeal.
I turned to the shiny, sleek, newer, perfect Maxum docked beside us — could it be?
Yes, I realized.. The shiny cruiser’s donkey was squealing, and soon the real estate developer would be dumping his burned poo overboard.
Did it matter I had to pee in a cup to enjoy floating vacations? Not really, I decided. Marine heads, after all, a great equalizer among the boating classes.
Tags: arkansas boating, boating, Greers Ferry Lake, humor, marine head, toilet, travel humor, travelers tales, vacation
