The Tao of Poo

It’s a cartoon blue morning. Rainbows spill from the crystal in the windshield onto the dashboard and the cup holder-sized coffee mug and the tiny cactus bouncing in the cup-holder sized pot next to it and my fingers. Still, this doesn’t quite make up for the 18-wheelers barreling past me on this four-lane stretch of the 1-10 East, where Ruby the van’s 19 feet feel like inches and the speed limit like a crawl. To say nothing of the task ahead of me.

There was never any question as to whether Ruby would have a toilet. In fact, a “loo cabinet” with a secure latch was the first thing I built, along with a bed frame. The I’ll-figure-it-out-when-I-get-there mode is one I’m familiar with. This is why I’m now halfheartedly following GPS coordinates to a “dump site,” having spent, until now, little to no time contemplating what emptying the toilet will entail.¹

I turn into what looks like a gas station. After circling the lot three times without seeing anything indicating a dump site, I pull into a parking spot. Inside, I join a line between two aisles of junk food.

“Ummm,” I say when it’s my turn at the counter, “can you tell me how to … I mean, where do I pay for the dump station?”

I’m not sure the attendant even says anything. But her face and posture speak clearly: It’s too early for this shit.

I look at her with doe eyes. “For RVs, you know.”

“Can I help you?” This she directs to the person in line behind me.

Eventually, I find a manager who smiles with his mouth and ushers me into a parallel universe that hides in plain sight at many highway gas stations across the US. All while unknowing commuters grab M&Ms, beef jerky, and cigarettes, at another counter, the diesel side counter, those who make their lives and living on the road buy showers and CB radios and laundry coins and access to communal septic tanks. The manager hands me a receipt with a code on it and points out the window.

I follow his finger and see nothing but gas station lot.

He sighs. “Come on.”

I trail him past cars lined up at pumps, past Ruby, and to a large rectangular cement pad. On the far side, a pole with a mounted keypad stands next to a rusty water pump. Below both is a heavy-looking cap in the concave center of a two-foot square, bricked off on three sides. I wait. But when my guide offers nothing more, I send him back inside with a nod like a release valve.

It’s clear enough where the code gets entered. How doing so relates to the rest remains a puzzle. I consider driving Ruby over, but the way the lot is set up, I’ll have to exit, come back in, and circle around once more. Retrieving the toilet seems the path of least resistance. So, I traipse to the van, lug the toilet from its cabinet, carry it across the lot, and set it on the sidewalk next to the pump before separating the part where you sit from the bottom, the tank. Wiping sweat from my forehead, I think about antiseptic wipes. Oh, and I’ll also need paper towels and Happy Camper, the organic deodorizer you mix with water after each dump. I march back to the van, squinting in the glare.

I once drove 15 hours to witness a total solar eclipse. On a lawn alongside friends and strangers, I oohed and ahed as the sun grew smaller. A half sun, what fun. We glanced at each other. Oh look, it’s a sliver now. Our cheeks gleamed in the warmth of its rays.

And then it ceased to exist, obliterated by our own hurtling around it. And I with it. Was I among those who cried out? Did I close my eyes and open them, close and open them, but still not see? Did I grasp handfuls of green blades, feel how they’d already gone cold? Take in a dying gasp?

More than a year after that first sanitation station, I will hurry along a lampless street—or more accurately, a street lined with unlit lamps. By then, I’ll know my way around a dumpsite. But I’ll have rolled after sunset into a town where I once lived, having put off the task of emptying the full tank till the next day.

When the need for a toilet before sleep comes unexpectedly, I’ll be only slightly annoyed to leave the warmth of the van, glad I’m somewhere familiar and know where to find a public restroom nearby. In the cool breeze, I’ll think of turning back for a jacket, but it’s not far. When I find a chain lock on the door, I’ll huff and press on to the next one, a block or so away—to the same result. Stay calm, I’ll tell myself.

As I turn onto the main street—a street along which I’ve skipped from bar to bar more times than I can count—and scan for open establishments, it will occur to me that the reason for both its emptiness and the closed restrooms is the ongoing lockdown. The former will make sense. To a flood of relief, I’ll see a light coming from a small grocery store I know well. When the light at the back half of the store goes out an employee makes his way to the front entrance, I’ll pull up my mask, dart across the street, and greet him in the doorway, giddy to have made it just in time. “Mind if I use the restroom real quick?”

He’ll shake his head quickly. Shut the door. Turn the sign to closed and then his back to me.

“Please,” I’ll call through the glass. I’ll look down at my sweat pants and old T-shirt and think of how the desert I drove here from is still in my hair and fingernails.

The sliver of light still on at the front of the store will go out, and I’ll look down the street to see nothing. I’ll shiver, dig my fingers into my pockets for anything there to clean myself with, calculate the distance back to the van, know it’s too far, know what I’ll become to anyone who sees me duck down the nearest side street.

Rarely is a dump site so accurately and artistically labeled as is this one. Newport, Oregon, years after the site in this story.

Back at the sanitation station, wipes and towels in hand, I find, parked on the cement pad, an RV so tall I have to lean back to see the satellite on its roof. Laughter and high-pitched yapping float down. I notice just above my head a ruffled cream curtain and a woman handing sandwiches to two small children petting a fluffy white dog. From around the gleaming black side of this mammoth, a man emerges, whistling. He kneels, pops open a lower side panel on his rig, and pulls from it a ringed plastic hose.

I fold my arms, narrow my eyes, and clear my throat.

Turning, he sees me squaring off astride what must look like a thick plastic briefcase. He cocks his head. “Oh,” he says after a moment. “Were you using this?”

“I haven’t put in my code,” I admit.

“Too bad you already got one.” He grins. “You could’ve used mine. Go ahead. You were here first.”

“No.” My shoulders fall. “You go. You’re probably faster.”

His head cocks again, and then his eyes sparkle. “Why don’t we do it together?” He nods to a slim green hose he’s set next to the rusty pump. “You can use my hose.”

I need my own hose?

“And these.” He hands over a pair of surgical gloves.

After he punches in his code, he steps on a protruding rectangular bar on the back of the cover, and up it pops. 

Aha.

He bends, inserts the black hose, and turns to flip a switch on his rig.

He sells satellite systems for boondockers. This is pre-Starlink. “TV, work, games, you name it. You can do it anywhere.” He hands me a card with his name penciled on the background. Like me, he and his family have just left Quartzite. A Tatooine-like outpost with a population of 2,000 and an infrastructure to match, the town is visited by 1.5 million people every year. I’ve been at Rubber Trump Rendezvous. RTR is an annual gathering hosted by Bob Wells, a real-life character from Nomadland, to bring together and offer resources to those who make their home on wheels, many out of necessity. My new friend and his family were at an RV show in another part of that vast, rocky desert.

“All done here.” He packs the black hose back in its compartment and beams. “You’re up.”

“OK?” I slowly loosen the cap on the briefcase. “Actually, you can take off. I got it now.”

“I’ll hold this.” I see he’s kept the toe of a pristine Timberland on the bar at the back of the cover, so it’ll stay open.

I aim the briefcase toward the hole below it, which now seems tiny, trying not to shake, and go for it. Although I’ll learn to do this like it’s nothing, this first attempt isn’t perfect. My cheeks go hot at the splatter, and I blurt out, “Oh shit.”

“That’s what the hose is for,” he says, breaking into my apology.

Once I’m done, he flips the water pump arm up and releases a stream of water toward the drain, keeping the cover open till the cement is clean. I can’t look away from a spot on his boot. Please let it be water.

Before I can thank him, he’s climbed to his captain seat and is waving down as his rig pulls away.

On that unlit street, I’ll be saved by a McDonald’s. I’ll dash toward the lobby light, so dim I’ll think it a mirage till I lurch through the doors and lay eyes on an attendant behind a counter. “Do you have a bathroom?” I’ll blurt out.

“You gotta buy something.”

I’ll want to cry. Then, in a move that I think surprises both of us, he’ll look up from the till. Our eyes will meet. He’ll nod toward the restroom and give me the door code before I can even say I don’t have my wallet on me.

On my way back to the van, I’ll make two vows. Never again will I wait to empty my tank once it’s full. And never will I forget how lucky I am to have a van to return to with a butane stove and a tea kettle and a string of lights I can dim with a switch and a table that holds an orange-scented candle and a handful of books next to a bed with cottony sheets and soft pillows.

In the middle of writing this piece, I’ll learn about how the US Supreme Court just overturned a lower court ruling that held it cruel and unusual to punish people for sleeping outside and in vehicles. I’ll think about what that will mean not just for me but also for the quarter of a million people in the US who live on streets, in parks, in cars, most not by choice.²

Budding salmon berries along one of my favorite walks, Mukilteo, Washington, May 2024.

My brother watched that same eclipse a couple states over on a hill overlooking grazing antelope. When the sun came back, the herd, who had knelt in unison, rose and bounded across the field, flanks awash in sunlight.

We who’d gathered on the grass got to our feet too. On the walk home, my friends and I ate blackberries from vines. I pressed them between my tongue and the roof of my mouth and almost cried at the warmth of the juice that dribbled down my chin.

The loo outside of its cabinet. Behind it, an orange candle, a roll of toilet paper, and a “bidet.”

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This is not the only entertaining moment I’ve had at a dump site. One experience in particular belongs in the strangers-helping-me-out “Ask and Give” column as much as this one does. I’ll tell that soon—unless you all are horrified and tell me in the comments to never again broach this topic.

PS. I’ll be featuring a guest writer,

Todd Weir

, for the next Ask and Give. And I can’t wait to share!

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1. I got the coordinates for this need, along with places to camp and shower and plug in and refill propane, from an app called iOverlander, which I recommend to anyone making a life on the road. You weren’t coming here for a dump site explanation, were you? Not with that title.

2. Jennifer Luden, “Supreme Court says cities can punish people for sleeping outside,” NPR, June 28, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/06/28/nx-s1-5022843/supreme-court-says-cities-can-punish-people-for-sleeping-outside#:~:text=In%20a%20major%20ruling%20on,parks%20or%20in%20their%20cars.