Here on The Rock, we're not completely off the grid; we do have electricity, from a cross-channel cable, yet we can pump our water by hand if need be. But, there is one thing that we don't do: we don't use a septic tank or flush our waste into Muscongus Bay: we use a privy.
A windy, overcast sunset from The Rock, taken this evening.
Follow me over the fold for more about how to care for a privy and do so in an ecologically friendly way....
's Haeusl, our privy built ca. 1952. This privy is unusual on account of the clerestory windows, like in a cathedral. Most privies do not have windows. This one has clerestory windows on both sides, plus a storage shed. It is also electrified, as can be seen in the photo which shows an electric cable, for use at night. The clerestory windows have me often calling it "Our Lady of Relief". 's Haeusl , a Southern German dialect form of "Das Haeuserl", "privy", was named by a former Austrian partner of mine who did the electrification 20 years ago.
Many people are afraid of privies, and justly so. Most of our memories of them are of latrines at summer camp or, worse, the "Port-a-Potty" at the rest area on an interstate where the flushing facilities are being fixed at about the end of a long, cross-country road trip when the whole family has to go--along with six or seven other families seeking similar relief. Usually, several small children are involved in this circus. It never ends well.
Not all privies, like mine, sit on their own pit. Bill Bryson, writing in At Home: A Short History of Private Life talks about the urban human waste problem in the first part of the 19th Century:
At Leeds in the 1830's, a survey of the poorer districts found that many streets were "floating with sewage;" one street, housing 176 families, had not been cleaned for 15 years....In London, the Thames absorbed anyting that wasn't wanted: condemned meat, offal, dead cats and dogs, food waste, industrial waste, human faeces, and much more.
This is nothing new for those of us who know that for a greater part of this century, our waste was flushed into rivers and bays, often without treatment.
Some people, like my family, kept our privies at our summer houses, and kept the rivers, lakes and bays clean. Here's how we do it:
The Honeydippers
My Russian-Czech grandmother grew up in Pennsylvania as a small girl, where she used a privy along with the 10 or so other people in her household. She remembers the "honeydippers", the men who cleaned out the privies, coming around from time to time.
Even here in Mid-Coast Maine, you can still see "three holers" attached to old apartment buildings on the mainland, where now bikes and shovels and rakes are now stored. One three-holer, at the family home of family friends here on the Peninsula, was still in use when I was a young kid in the early 70's.
There are several ways to deal with a privy. One is to build it so you can move it, over a new hole. Another way, the way we do it, is to build it over a hole and empty it out every year or so. Untreated night-soil, that wonderful euphemism for human crap, is very dangerous. It should never be used as fertilizer (it often has been throughout history) but must be treated and handled in an appropriate manner. We do it this way:
Care of Your Privy
Our privy does not stink. There is, even at the height of the scant two months we call "Summer" in off-coastal Maine, never a "high" stink. It's because we help compost our waste with chlorinated lime or, a mixture of common garden lime and powdered laundry bleach. It helps it break down, cuts odor, and makes shoveling out of the hole--honeydipping--from the little door in the back much more pleasant.
Treating the waste that way also cuts down on any spread of disease. No one, to my knowledge, has ever gotten sick here. The waste is above the water table, and the well is drilled 150 feet deep.
What to Do With Your Waste
Every year or so, depending upon how much it is used, the privy has to be shoveled out. Now, we are on a big granite rock. That means that a pick and shovel are needed to dig a hole in which to bury it. That takes a good morning's work, just to dig the hole. It should be lined with lime, and the contents of the honey-hole are transferred by wheelbarrow or simply spade-by-spadefull and then the earth and the loose rocks are tossed on top. This should be done carefully, and never in a boggy place or near a spring or stream. The contents return to the earth, so to speak, completely within about five years. The hole under the privy is then sprinkled with lime, and is ready to receive its due.
So there you have it: a decent way to dispose of waste, handle it well, and keep it out of rivers, bays and aquifers.
This diary should at once make you thankful for your flush toilet and also think about where all that waste goes.