Toilet Topics

Okay, last post I said I’d talk about my poor survival skills, but that’s a complicated one, so it’ll have to wait a day or two.

The Navy, in our performance of shipboard work, requires us to have "firewatches" whenever we are doing hotwork. Hotwork is welding, burning (cutting with a torch), or grinding. Anything that produces fire or sparks. Depending on the location and type of work we may have to have one or two or, in some cases, even more firewatches present on the job. The firewatches are unskilled laborers who have undergone a couple of hours of training and are handed a fire extinguisher. They are women for the most part, generally uneducated. The majority are black. Some work for our company directly, others are "contractors," a term used for anyone coming from a temp agency. They are paid low wages, between $7 and $10 an hour.

This morning I overheard my firewatch recounting to a co-worker a conversation I had had with her yesterday. We’ll call her Margaret. She is a shortish, heavyset black woman, aged 49.

Yesterday, she was telling one of the people working with me about a firewatch she knew on second shift who had just been caught smoking on the ship and fired. She noted that it had been stupid of the woman to smoke on the ship, given how closely second shift was being watched. The conversation then turned to the reason second shift was being watched so closely; namely, that--so it is said--there have been repeated instances of people pissing in plastic soda or water bottles and leaving them on the ship, or taking a shit in places not designated for that purpose. Needless to say, this is somewhat embarrassing for the company. I’ve been curious about why anyone would do this, so I asked Margaret why she thought they did it. I should say that the company maintains two or three porta-johns on the ship. These are cleaned every morning, but with hundreds of workers on the ship they get pretty gross anyway, and I’m sure they’re even worse by the time second shift gets to them. Well, Margaret said she didn’t know and wouldn’t condone such activity, but admitted that sometimes on the job she had to pee real bad, and that she refuses to use the porta-johns. Presumably because of lack of cleanliness, but I think there’s also a widely-held belief that disease can be transmitted through using them. I should also note that since the ship is in drydock, using the bathrooms at the head of the pier is something of a journey. There are, I think, 46 steps down the stairs of the drydock wingwall (then, of course, up again), not to mention climbing the gangway off and on the ship to the drydock or off and on the drydock to the pier.
Anyhow, the interesting part to me was that, given Margaret’s reluctance to use the porta-johns, I asked her if she had never used an outhouse. Not only did she say she had never used one, which seemed surprising enough, she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen one and I had to describe them to her, both outside and in and how you used them--that is, by sitting on the hole in a board. The only thing she could say was that she remembered someone talking about having to tell the kids not to play near the outhouse. What was surprising to me about this was that Margaret was born in and lived all her life in the city where our shipyard is located. Now I can recall, not more than 20 or 25 years ago, seeing outhouses in the countryside of our state, not more than an hour or two away from us. You’d see these behind the sorts of houses that looked like they might once have belonged to sharecroppers. I’m sure there are parts of our state where some people still don’t have indoor plumbing.
I come from another state, originally, a more prosperous state where everyone had indoor plumbing. Still, there have been quite a few times in the past when I have used outhouses--sometimes on camping trips, but other times elsewhere, such as public parks or rest stops, and I’m not that much older than Margaret. Yet she never had that dubious experience, even though she’s black and living so close to an area where the country blacks, at least until recent memory, have had to rely on them.