Backsplash from a Pit Toilet

A couple of years ago, I went camping in New Hampshire with my friend Scott. We stayed over the weekend, Thursday to Monday or Tuesday, to go climbing at Cathedral Ledge and Withehorse.

Thursday at the campsite, one of the campsites along the Kankamangus highway, passed quietly, and without incident. So did Friday night. Saturday was a different story. The radios started playing early, and the yahoos came out of the woodwork- every *good* camper's worst nightmare. You could hear, smell, and feel the drunked debauchery and excess that was going on in quite a few of the campsites around us. Sleep came hard and late that night.

The next morning came, and we got up early to go climbing again. After breakfast, the coffee did it's usual magic, and I wandered off to the Pit Toilet to offload some excessive baggage. As I approached the toilet, I noticed something was...different. It was like something died nearby. As I got closer, I realized that the smell was eminating from the outhouse structure itself, and it stank like you would not believe. No ordinary stink, this, it was fouler than Beelzebub's own toilet after a hard night with cheap beer. But I had to poop, so I reluctantly opened the door and was almost swept away by the stench. I started to suspect that someone had thrown a body into the pit a few weeks ago, and it was only now starting to decompose. Looking seven or so feet down the toilet into the pit revealed the ugliest possible miasma of human effluent. I sat, determined to do this deed as quickly as possible.

The poop, when it came very quickly after I sat down, was a good one. Solid, one piece, and torpedo shaped (I imagine, I didn't actually check). It came out rapidly, like a watermelon seed that was squeezed between two fingers. It shot out so quickly, and so determinedly, that my morbid imagination started to go over various scenarios, and the most likely one was that this thing was goign to hit that stuff down below...hard. What happens when a solid object hits the water straight down? It creates a hole, which the water fills up quickly with a *splat* noise, and ejects a good quantity of water upwards.

This turd hit the waterwith the poise and grace of an olympic diver and created a perfect hole in the vileness below. The vileness, in turn, rushed in to obey the laws of physics, and with a flat sounding *splat* that made me absolutely cringe, I knew I was to be on the recieving end of some really foul shit.

Indeed, that horror below was ejected up over seven feet into the air to splatter on my butt. I knew from the moment of launch that this would happen, yet I was frozen in disbelief until I actually felt it on my nether regions. Needless to say, there were no shower facilities at this campsite. It was the most disgusting thing to happen to me in a long, long time.


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Break to a few weeks ago when I went with Molly and the kids to Story Land, in New Hampshire. We took the Kank because it was a more scenic route, and halfway through the drive across it, Nate informed us that he had to go to the bathroom. We stopped at a rest area on the Kank that had, right there by the side of the road, a pit toilet.

Now Nate is sort of fascinated with holes in the ground in general, and his absolute love is to drop things into the water. The pit toilet represented a novelty of the First Order. I went in there with him because he likes to have the company, and because I don't want him to pick up a candy bar with nuts in it or anything. So, he manoevers himself onto the toilet seat after a long investigation of the hole, looking at all the shite and yucch down at the bottom. He is very excited at the prospect of being able to drop something from his own body into the water, and is somehow craning his head around to look down the hole as he sits on the edge of the seat.

You know what happens next, I bet.

A big :PLOP!: and then backsplash reaches up, out of the toilet seat, into the air a few feet, and splatters onto his head. He had no idea. I was simply horrified.

I don't know what I'm going to do about pit toilets in the future.