Code Brown

The planet is overflowing with fecal matter. There’s not enough smell-good spray in the universe to cover it up. As one of the larger dominant species on Earth, we produce a lot of poop. It's not a savory subject, but it is one worth considering. We are one serious engineering catastrophe away from being reverted to a very nasty period in history when being inundated with defecation was a way of life.

You may be asking whether I really want to use an entire essay to talk about number twos, and the answer is, to quote the popular and adorable children's book title: “Everybody Poops”. It happens. Whether or not we want to face it (ahem), sitting on the crapper is one of life's most inevitable things, right up there with death and taxes (both of which can cause one's bowels to release). Nothing we do can prevent poop. Not the most potent willpower, not the most intense abdominal strength can prevent the inevitable. As my Uncle Dan used to say, “It’s something that not even Superman can hold back.” 

Our entire lives are, in one way or another, ordered around going to the bathroom. We all (almost) have bathrooms in our homes, but so do offices, churches, restaurants, and there are (in some states) rest stops with the appropriate accommodations for relieving one’s bowels every so many miles along interstates. 

While preparing for a colonoscopy a few summers ago, I was astounded to discover just how full of shit we all really are. It took all of 36 hours for me to clear my intestines of all solid waste, and it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life in which I partook voluntarily for the health of the tubes that produce and move waste through my body to its eventual release into a receptacle and at length into an exponentially longer and convoluted set of larger pipes and drains run by our town. Contrary to popular belief, the average set of adult small intestines is only about 22 to 25 feet long, the large intestines about 5 feet. There's still a lot of flex tubing in the tummy area, but it takes that much to turn our food into absorbed nutrients and remove the unused portion along with excess water, dead cells and bacteria from our corporeal forms.

Most of us (about 50%) use the bathroom to remove solid waste about once a day. Depending on diet and exercise, of course. Some (about 28%) use the bathroom twice a day, again depending on diet. Not only are we what we eat, but we are also what we poop. The truth is, humans, whatever else we have done to change the planet for the better, poop a lot, and it is having an effect, whether we want to talk about it or not. Dealing with poop is a $9.5 billion-a-year industry.

Americans have been thinking about their backsides a lot lately. A very unpleasant parasite called cyclospora has got everyone shunning fresh lettuce, berries, and cilantro. The bug, if ingested, can cause “explosive, watery diarrhea” that lasts for several days to a few weeks and, without proper medical attention, can be lethally dehydrating. Most frightening of all is that the parasite takes time to gestate in the system, up to two weeks in some cases, meaning even people who haven’t eaten anything contaminated in the last few weeks can still be carrying the bug and not yet experience the symptoms. Horrifying as this sounds and has been for the over 18,000 people who have gotten the parasite, this particular bug might have been a far worse and more common (as well as deadly) experience even just a century ago, especially in the more sparsely populated areas of the world. Healthcare, clean water, produce-handling standards and access to appropriate curative medicines have reduced such outbreaks, as well as education about how washing fruit and veg (and hinies and hands) have helped immensely. The sad fact is we are still susceptible, no matter how many safety precautions are put in place to protect us. It is worse in poor or rural places and in countries where sanitation standards are still pretty much in the Dark Ages.

Micki had to deal with an arresting bout of something horrible on her trip to Ecuador, a decade ago. She was as careful as could be, but still fell afoul of the infamously unclean water that can occur. It was the same for a former teacher of mine, who had the honor to travel to China for a teaching gig and wound up with a serious and hard-to-eradicate intestinal bug that hung with him for months. Yes, we all poop, but regular, healthy pooping is the preferred outcome of any trip to the potty but it is intensely and still fairly rare except in industrialized nations. 

I reflected on all of this, one night recently, as the house lay quiet, and I was experiencing my own eye-popping bout of intestinal distress. I woke with severe nausea and cramps in my pelvic region. I spent some time groaning and gasping through what imitated the description of the CDC website symptoms of cyclospora mentioned above. By midnight, I was worried, by 2 a.m., I was deeply concerned. By 4, I was messaging my doctor to beg her to put in a prescription for the antibiotic that kills the bug. By 8 the following morning, I was bedraggled, dehydrated, unpleasantly rung out and very tender in the nether regions. Thank the gods for Pepto Bysmol.

Later that morning, I awoke from a dismal stupor to my buzzing phone. The nurse had put in an order for me to go to the outpatient facility to leave a stool sample. I would have laughed out loud but for fear of having an accident. The mechanics of trying to catch the required substance to get a culture seemed like something out of the scatological comedies of John Waters. No thank you, I mumbled as I took more of the pink stuff and laid back down.

As it turns out, I was being a little hypochondriacal in the wee hours but in my dessicated state, it's not surprising I got panicky. Sometimes news from the world leaks in and let's face it, I wasn't at my best. I don't want to reach for melodrama, but, other than a night of post-binge vomiting followed by a roaring hangover, there have been few times that I seriously wondered if I was staring down the barrel of a very disgusting demise.

I wouldn't be the first. About 1.2 million Americans died of complications due to diarrhea as recently as 2021, the most recent complete data we have on the subject. Over 400,000 of those were infants. The World Health Organization blames poor water and sanitation, and one might expect that to be elsewhere in the world, especially in the places that Sally Struthers shows up asking you to contribute a cup of coffee's worth of help. Actually, a lot of people right here at home are incredibly susceptible, especially way out in the “boonies”, poor communities and especially in homeless camps. The latter has been a real problem recently, as such encampments have been a fixture of almost every town in America. Similarly, contaminated wells in western NC, in the wake of Hurricane Helene jammed hospitals with intakes related to parasites and bacterial infections of the lower digestive tracts. Our Ethan had to dump copious amounts of cleansing chlorine into his own well, thereafter as a precaution. Even so, he still uses a series of redundant but mind-easing filtering solutions.

Diarrhea was, until about 1900, one of the three top killers of humanity, alongside tuberculosis and pneumonia. Clean water, sanitation and working sewer systems provided some relief. In the age of vaccines, a particular kind of infant-susceptible intestinal bug was nearly eradicated until the most recent administration started putting out false information that the vaccine caused intellectual delays. Credulous parents and anti-vaxxers went on a tirade about the drug and many more infants died as a result. None of the claims made were based on actual (and very available) empirical data. But then the man making the claims had dead worms in his cerebellum, likely caused by drinking unclean water while in Africa. Go figure.

Generally, Americans have faced a fairly robust reversal in sanitary water, not just from storms but from severe cuts to infrastructure, which puts into context not only how important such funding is, but also, just how close we are to old-world horrors. Without saying that this was the direct intent, there is a Hobbesian feeling to it all. People who are forced into dangerous water situations, whether by lack of access to clean water, safe disposal of waste, or by dismantling of education and tax-funded resources, have a way harder time thinking critically about how to fix their world.

Hobbes said, in his masterpiece Leviathan, that such a condition pits human against human and human against the natural world. The implication is fairly straightforward: it doesn't take much to tip things back to an older and more dangerous time.

At any rate, we tend to take all of this for granted. With each successful flush, I was brought back to just a few months ago, when our household plumbing was compromised by a root system that blocked the drain line from our en-suite bathroom.

Our house is nearly ninety years old and is, in some parts, a series of four additions onto the original house (not all made by us). One of the earlier renovations turned the former garage into a bedroom with an en-suite. The plumbing was tied into the house's larger drain system, and it was done with oil-soaked cardboard tubing called Orangeburg pipe. This ridiculously fragile system is easily cracked and shatters like a terracotta plate. It took three months, some serious outdoor demolition and an obscene amount of money to get it fixed with a functional outdoor cleanout to a state far better than we purchased, but for that time, we had to use a half bath that we wittily call The Chocolate Bathroom, not because of what's done in there, but because of the color it was painted when we bought it. We've since decorated it with Hershey's memorabilia. We're a funny family.

There's nothing funny about drain plumbing. I did a little math to make the point. The average adult poops two-to-three times per day. Assuming a family of four grown-ups, that's 8-to-12 poops a day per household, assuming everyone's tummies are functioning more or less normally. On our street, from one intersection to the next, there are ten houses. That's 80 to 120 poops per day, just from a very small section of our street. There are 27,990 residents of our small town. Assuming each one poops about 3 times per day, that's just shy of 100,000 flushes, not including guests in town, people with intestinal issues, and kids, who poop a lot more than adults. The burden of waste on the city's aging infrastructure is a topic for another essay, but suffice it to say, that's a LOT of crap. Larger towns have larger issues, and big cities are terrifyingly huge poop bombs just waiting to destroy communities downstream.

This happened in Asheboro, recently, when a very high concentration of a potent chemical was not completely filtered out by an aging and strained system, affecting the Deep River and communities and water systems that depend on the same reservoirs. Our system is being monitored and updated, but such a failure is fairly critical.

Most sanitation systems are quite old, and understaffed, as well as susceptible to threats like cyber attacks, upstream inundations of water, excess storm runoff, chemical spills and, like from Helene, massive storms. Under regular operational standards and proper upkeep, most systems can handle daily amounts. But as the weather becomes more chaotic and equipment more expensive and difficult to acquire, many US towns are on borrowed time.

The good news is that, from 1900 on, continually improving systems for dealing with sewage and pollution have been developed and are available. The real question is whether or not they are affordable. A small town like Asheboro has limited funds and many needed projects to attend to. Most of us want things we can see, like parking or building remodeling, to be managed first, because we all take for granted that our next flush will be as successful as the last thousand.

The reality is, it takes everyone informing themselves, not just of the dangerous parasites that can cause serious problems, like cyclospora, but also, an awareness that each person's tax bill helps to keep things—for lack of a better term--regular.

In the meantime, I'm avoiding salads, berries, fresh parsley and cilantro, and washing my hands like a fiend. It turns out my illness came, not from contaminated veggies or berries, but from failure to clean my water bottle regularly and also the water tube on our fridge. The combo was intensely disruptive to my sleep and my naturally sleek digestive system. I won't soon forget the inherently important lesson. And I will continue to send thoughts to those who are suffering with digestive issues: I hope they feel better soon. I cannot think of a much worse way to feel.