Sunday, June 14, 2015

Day 19: poop deck

Dawn breaks. A gentle drizzle begins over Memphis, Tennessee. Piers stumbles out of his tent to attach the rain fly, and wonders where his tentmate, Clement, has gone. Three out of four Cat-Sassians are aboard her supple deck in the Memphis Yacht Club transient dock.

Rewind thirty minutes.

Clement unzips the tent door and does a slow and graceless somersault over Piers' sleeping body. Nature has called, and Clement can't let it go to voicemail this time. He runs up the hill to find a bathroom, remembering one down a corridor he'd used last night. 30 steps from the door he can only waddle, but makes it to the door successfully. It is locked. Clement swears out loud with no small velocity, waddles around a corner, and has no choice but to relieve himself in a concrete corner of the corridor.

The crew has a relaxed start, slowly dismantling the tents and chatting with the marina staff. They gave us sausage patties and told us about other boats that had stopped there that were traveling the whole river, including a boat that was entirely solar powered, and a boat that was made of the top half of a VW camper van. We all felt a bit inadequate in our dirty and fuel-inefficient pontoon boat, but felt better when they gave us the bargain of our lives on 3 gallons of motor oil and also some complimentary novelty Memphis Yacht Club license plates. I, Clement, stopped by the Mud Island Mississippi museum gift shop to pick up some post cards, and talked to the attendant about Elvis for half an hour. She respected him a lot, "but not his doctor," who had given him no nutritional advice. She had also once owned a wooden box lined with the upholstery of one of his couches, and her cousin was married to his cousin. 

Feeling like we had conquered Memphis, we pushed off and carried on southward. 

Herein I will address several questions people have had about the poop bucket:

The poop process is a simple 10 step procedure:

1. Take the lid off the bucket
2. Line the bucket with a large garbage bag (Piers gave it the mathematic abbreviation "P1," though I suppose for me it would be "C1," for Bennett "B1," and so on)
3. Line P1 with a smaller garbage bag (P2)
4. Attach the attractive custom bucket lid toilet seat
5. Place head+limbs through appropriate holes of the privacy poncho
6. Remove pants/shorts, sit down and do some business
7. Stand up, pull up pants, take off privacy poncho, and remove attractive custom bucket lid toilet seat
8. Tie up P2 very tightly 
9. Tie up P1 very tightly
10. Place bucket lid back on bucket 

Though we've only ever had one P2 per P1 before we had the chance to empty the bucket (emptying the poop bucket is our prime concern), if two people used the bucket in a row, the second would untie P1, re-line the bucket with P1, and line the bucket with P2' (math-speak for P2 prime). 

After many hours of travel, we arrived in Helena, Arkansas, tied off our boat near an abandoned boat ramp, and walked into town. Helena is a former blues capital of the South, and is home to the Delta Cultural Museum. 


Unfortunately this was closed when we arrived, but we walked down the Main Street to find the annual Cherry Festival in full bloom, wherein we saw an amazing and interminable blues band, and a Kool-Aid pickle eating contest. 



Aside from a liquor store and a Mexican restaurant, nothing in the whole town was open. 

We walked back to our faithful steed, whipped up a bit of pasta, had a few rounds of cards all cramped in Piers' tent, and then hit the hay. Everyone reported that we had each frequently woken up to the suspicion that a meandering fishing boat was scoping out our boat for robbery. We woke to no stolen goods.

1 comment:

  1. Small request from Iris: Iris appreciated the poop process description, but would love to see a series of photos showing the daily routines when living on a boat on river. (That includes going to the bathroom.)

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