I woke up after a dozen hours in the sack with a familiar sense of urgency. I know some folks who would have alerted their friends with some sort of a rude announcement about turtles’ heads or the like, but I just lumbered silently past Dave’s tent to the other side of the island. I had planned carefully, auguring this moment last night when I was stuffing myself with refried bean and ground soy burritos after a day of typical west coast rain in Desolation Sound. So when I’d spotted the fine flat dish of bark by our unloading site, I’d picked it up and stashed it in my vestibule for this moment.
Don’t ever try this in fresh water, but a great way to dispose of human waste on the coast is the shit-put, recommended by Peter McGee in Kayak Routes of the Pacific Northwest Coast. This is a good way to speed the breakdown of waste in the marine environment and avoid the contamination of shellfish beds and beaches in popular paddling areas. McGee advises, “Find something such as a large, flat rock to serve as a platter to launch the feces into the water. Then do your business a comfortable distance from the water, take the rock to the water’s edge and throw it as far as you can into the ocean. It may not be pretty but it works.”
It can also be surprisingly entertaining. Now I took the bark and admired it’s flat, slightly concave surface and football size. “Perfect,” I thought, smiling in the chill air of a February morning. The rocky point I’d cased out the day before, on the other side of the small island, provided a perfect launching point into the deep water of an open channel—the best possible disposal site on the heavily used Curme Islands—and the best view from a low squatting position one could possibly dream of.
Low clouds of a breezeless morning draped over the peaks of the sound, melding with the winter white amidst the trees high on the slopes of East Redonda Island and majestic Mount Denman behind. The crowds of summer sailors were slumbering back in the city or enacting their own morning rituals over warm porcelain hundreds of kilometers away as I felt the bite of cold air and settled down to enjoy one of life’s great unsung pleasures before the deserted tableau of God’s own bathroom.
Then I gingerly carried the bark to the edge of the rocky promontory with the fruit of my labours painstakingly coiled atop it. I should note that such scatological intimacy is a great opportunity to assess the efficiency of the trip diet. I resolved then and there that there are certain seeds I won’t bother adding to my next batch of trail mix.
I wound up for the launch and then paused. There’s always a limit to how much energy you can safely apply at this moment. Too much force and the enterprise can go badly awry, and this is not something you ought to mess around with in a place where there are no hot showers. Not enough force, however, and the whole point of the shit-put is defeated. Pondering this delicate calculus – EUREKA! I had a moment of semi-divine inspiration.
I set the bark carefully afloat at the water’s edge. And there drifted my pride and joy, an impressive three-burrito-sized, dirt-hued monument capped by burnt toilet paper, still smoking like a pyre and lazily spinning on the limpid sur- face of the morning tide. I was tempted to christen it with champagne! But I had another, eco-friendly plan.
I would throw rocks just short of my barque of bark, allowing the ripples to push it farther adrift until – in a bittersweet finale – I would sink it with a direct hit. I had lofty visions of a new kayaking sport. Fun for the whole group! The rocks and trash talk would fly until a winner could gleefully declare, “I sunk your battleshit!”
But the sport was pre-demonstration phase, and my partners were still asleep. So I began lob- bing rocks until the target was a healthy distance toward international waters. Then I remembered that my environmental ethics are a good deal bet- ter than my throwing arm. Try as I might, my efforts fell short and pushed the fecal barge further out into the channel, where it was succumbing to the pull of the ebbing tide out toward the Georgia Strait. It listed slightly to port – or was that starboard? Water gently lapped at the cargo, but the bark nevertheless sailed true and showed no sign of capsizing.
I threw until my shoulder ached and my empty stomach urged me back to the campsite. With feelings of defeat mixed with an odd sense of mis- chievous pride, I saluted and turned my back on what was fast becoming but a speck on the still sea, like just another piece of driftwood riding the tides of fate to its own peculiar destiny. “What if…,” an absurd hope crossed my mind. But then I dismissed it and walked across the island to eat breakfast and share my morning tale.
Never underestimate the entertainment value of a good shit story in the bush. I launched a debate about the trajectories and speeds of tides, driftwood and homeward-bound kayaks, and soon there was a sealed bet against the odds of a rendezvous with my morning creation. Wilderness ethics had become a business venture.
A couple of hours later we packed up the campsite and aimed our bows away from Desolation Sound, following the tide toward the put-in. I was the first to spot the Unidentified Floating Object.
“That couldn’t be it,” said Dave. “There’s no way. No way!” But the speck floating unevenly on the water a kilometer away from camp looked familiar.
“I think it is!” I proclaimed with mounting excitement. The cadence of spinning paddles increased as we raced to see who could be the first to confirm the sighting, and then back-paddled furiously as the verdict became undeniable.
I pulled gingerly alongside the floating bark and scooped it onto my paddle, while Dave stifled hysterics long enough to capture the moment without capsizing, camera and all.
“You, my friend, owe me ten bucks!” I said. “That’s enough to buy three more burritos.” I may finally have figured out how to make a career out of sea kayaking.
Before paddling away, I carefully inverted my paddle blade and finished what I’d begun.