A Certain Unbeautiful Substance: Of Sewers and the Social Contract

This I wrote as a "Radio-Free Robin," or quasi-political column, not a Bob, for this week's Sentinel.

A Certain Unbeautiful Substance:  Of Sewers and the Social Contract

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Once I was looking at some artist’s conception of a Civil War battle, noble-looking generals on noble-looking horses in a green field under a blue sky, when suddenly it struck  me that, in real life, with that much cavalry the place must have been absolutely oozing in horse poop.

That’s an unromantic view of history but not a patch on what you will find if you read, as I just did, W. Hodding Carter’s book Flushed:  How the Plumber Saved Civilization.  Carter’s portrait of Western society before modern sanitation oozes with a different species of poop altogether.

How did your narrator, a garden writer so Victorian she refers to herself in the first-person plural, become involved in the study of what I’m pretty sure her garden writer avatar would refer to as “a certain unbeautiful substance that is, however, useful in horticulture as a soil amendment?”

Well, anyone who reads the front page of this newspaper will remember that in Dade County we have two ongoing water board issues, Canyon Ridge and Brow Wood, that are enough to keep a local news reporter’s mind firmly in the sewer. 

But it’s more than that. 

People sometimes ask how I stay awake covering county commission meetings.  They’re missing the glaring truth:  Local government is the nuts and bolts of democracy.

Similarly, waste management is the most basic requirement of collective living, which is to say why people consent to be governed in the first place.  These tea partiers who bellow they want government out of their lives, what do you suppose they’d be bellowing if there were fluids swirling around their ankles more objectionable than, say, tea? 

My guess is it would be something along the lines of, “There oughta be a law,” or “Help!” notwithstanding the absence in the Constitution of a single word pertaining to poop. 

In the country, of course, we take care of these matters ourselves, latterly with privately-owned septic tanks, formerly with more rustic accommodations.  Really, depending on how far one lives from one’s neighbors, one could get away with nothing at all, though I must say my own apertures seal shut with a little noise – snap! – as I type the words.

But when people gather in greater concentrations, poop looms larger as a social issue, as Hodding Carter’s book shows us, sparing few details.  To begin with, what, pray tell, do you suppose castle moats were really for?

Yes.  Moats were circular cesspits, and if you swam one to rescue a fair princess you’d probably die of a disease before you got across.  (And if you did get there, she’d probably say “Ick!” and push you back in.)

But cities were much, much worse.  In Paris, householders would empty their bedpans into the streets with the thoughtful if euphemistic warning, “Gardez, l’eau!”  (“Watch it, water!”)  In London, the warning was anglicized to “gardy-loo” and is possibly the reason the English still call a bathroom a loo. 

But this was Western civilization, home of the free market, and it wasn’t long before the trade of “nightman” or “gongfermor” arose to make a buck off the situation.  These nocturnal entrepreneurs collected the unbeautiful substance – which came to be called “nightsoil” – and carted it out to the country to sell to farmers as a soil amendment.

As London grew, there were more people and more “nightsoil.”  Cesspits were built and overflowed, and eventually it seemed sensible to cover up the streams and rivers, build houses on top of them and dump raw sewage into the water.

Result:  an unbelievably polluted Thames, a tainted drinking water supply, cholera epidemics, infant mortality approaching 50 percent – and in 1846 the covered Fleet River exploded from methane buildup, taking three houses with it.

Advocates for the poor had been demanding that the government do something since the 1820s, but the English autocrats didn’t act until they were affected personally.  It was the Great Stink of 1858, when the air in Parliament made members vomit, not the cholera pandemic of 1849 that decimated the population, that finally kick-started London’s sanitation push.

            Now let’s move across the globe to Asia, where the great Ganges –

(Here I cannot help telling you that when I came across the word “Ganges” in a crossword puzzle and asked my husband about it, he male-answered without pausing for thought that it was an embarrassing health condition, as in:  “My Ganges is swoll up so bad, I cain’t hardly zip up my britches.”)

– where the great Ganges, the sacred river of India, is more full of poop than a family-values Republican with a mistress in Argentina.  But the lack of sanitation is more than just a disease vector in India; it is also the instrument of social injustice.  How do you suppose the Untouchables got to be untouchable?

Yes:  Poop.  Someone was needed to carry it out of the crowded villages, and thus the caste was born – a caste that was to be treated with shocking unfairness throughout the millennia because of the despised labor forced upon it. 

The Indians are even now working on this problem, and Carter quoted Prime Minister Nehru as saying: “The day every one of us gets a toilet to use, I shall know that our country has reached the pinnacle of progress.”

In Dade County, sewers are seen as the key to growth, attracting not just new residents but desperately needed industry.  The question is not whether they’re necessary but who will pay for them, and the answers proposed may strike you as being full of a certain unbeautiful substance useful in horticulture as a soil amendment.

A humble substance indeed, but one which seems, nevertheless, to be at the very heart of the Social Contract.

END

Red, Red Robin: A Commie in the Cabbage Patch

     My newspaper would probably deny this, and perhaps I'm being too sensitive; but I have found it to be true that the only letters-to-the-editor about your narrator that make it into print are the ones pointing out errors I've made.  I know there actually have been over the years a few "We Like BLA" letters, because the staff used to forward them to me for my private delectation.  (They don't anymore.)

     The letter that this column was written in response to was a funny combination of praise and condemnation.  It said something like:  Bob sure is funny, too bad she's a Commie.  So naturally the Sentinel printed it!

     I'm not going to go into the gradations of politics where I live, but trust me, out here you are not so much left, right or center as right, further right, or out there circlin' Jupiter.  It's why I don't talk politics!  I talk gardening!  But I guess I just don't look like a Republican and that's what the letter-writer was talking about.

     Anyway, I seized gleefully on the occasion to explain about the endnotes to the column, the bit about playing quietly in the dirt.  I lifted it from a guy named Voltaire and it encapsulated what I was trying to do politically when I first starting writing Bob, which was:  stay out of politics.

    And in any case, it gave me a chance to tell the fesse story.  I love the fesse story! 

A COMMIE IN THE CABBAGE PATCH:  BOB’S LITTLE MANIFESTO

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Choosing vegetables for one’s garden in the winter months provides the gardener a pleasurable and fat-free way to pass the long hibernal evenings, the opportunity to plan for maximum nutrition and efficiency, and the leisure to root out any potentially subversive influences that might transform the innocent seedbed into a hotbed of un-American activity.

            As I flipped through the Stokes catalog this morning, a patriotic smile curved my lips as I added to my list:  Corn.  America is built on corn.  Everything from breakfast cereal to face powder is made of corn in our mighty nation.  Words like “sweet,” “robust” and “traditional” are used in the ad copy. 

But as my eyes drifted through the glossy pictures, a worried frown creased my brow.  What was this variety, “Strawberry Popcorn?”  Oh, popcorn is all very well.  What could be more American than shoveling the fluffy salted puffs into one’s maw while sprawled on the carpet on a Saturday night, watching an old John Wayne movie?  But Strawberry?

Not to mince words, my dear, it was as red as Chairman Mao.

Give me vegetables that are green, I thought, the color of spring and U.S. dollars.  Green beans, spinach, bell peppers.  I paused, racked by a nagging doubt.  Peppers turn red when mature.  Well, lettuce then.  Lettuce is reliably green.

But wait a minute:  Is green not the color of the foam-mouthed environmentalist crazies who are destroying the very foundations of American life, according to the a.m. pundits?  Good lord, what vegetable was safe?

Cauliflower, I supposed; white is associated with purity.  But also with anemia, and pus.  I have never been attracted to the big pale globes like bumpy bleached brains.

Flipping disconsolately, I found myself on the beet page.  A sea of scarlet!  I was flooded by visions of Bolsheviks brandishing their spoons menacingly above bowls of blood-red borscht as they chanted, “We will bury you.”

I fainted.

All right.  I’m joking.  Historically, flowers may have stood for one movement or another but vegetables do not generally get into anything more political than, say, soup.  My point is, neither does your narrator.

I am reacting, with gentle hurt sarcasm, to a letter from a reader, published in the Sentinel last week, that, though praising Bob’s Little Acre, made reference to its narrator’s leftist leanings.

Let me make it clear that I am tickled pink by any mail at all, and that life has so humbled me that I am used to any compliments aimed in my direction being of the for-a-fat-girl-you-don’t-sweat-much variety.  My favorite was from another reader who observed how fortunate it was that I was such a failure as to write for a small newspaper, that I might be enjoyed locally.

And to be fair, the accusation of political bias was leveled not at my horticultural maunderings but my news coverage.  But this I find equally perplexing.  How much leftist propaganda can feasibly be worked into a story about new hours for the county dump?  Within the context of local politics, leaning left, right or center usually means you have fallen asleep, and are fixin’ to fall out of your chair.

I think if I have an agenda at all, it comes from Voltaire’s masterpiece, Candide, which I read in 10^th-grade French class.

In the story, the young Candide and his friends set out in the world with a certain ism – in this case, optimism, the view that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.  But immediately they are caught up in a series of catastrophes including plagues, wars, shipwrecks, the great earthquake of Lisbon and auto da fe hangings.

One character is an old lady who was once a beautiful princess (before being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery, of course).  When the other characters ask her to sit down and tell her story, she replies, “I will sit, but only on one fesse.”

In French, a fesse is the half of one’s derriere on one side or the other of its great dividing line.  It is just like the French to have a word for this.  It is just like the English not to.

But the old lady’s recounting of her tale is interrupted by the latest disaster.  “Quick!” say the others.  “We must escape.  Can you ride a horse?”

“Yes,” she replies, “though only on one fesse.”

As they trot away, she finishes telling her adventures, one of which involves being holed up with an army surrounded by Cossacks.  During the long winter siege, cannibalism provided the only nourishment, and her left fesse became dinner for the troops.

After many more such vicissitudes, the characters find themselves content to take shelter from the great conflicts of the world on a little farm where they grow vegetables.  The secret of life, they discover, is to abandon isms and to cultivate one’s own garden.

I took the phrase for my own.  Personally, I translate it:  “to play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.”   

And it is my only agenda, whether rolling in the dirt or dishing it out.  Yes, I’m a little green – we gardeners can’t help it, it starts in the thumb and works its way up.  But red?  I may have borrowed Che’s cigar once or twice (though usually only as an afterthought, when I needed his machinegun), but I do not shelter from the sun under a little green hat with a star on it.  I prefer the Aunt Loweezy style of chapeau, thank you, with roses and grapes and a pinecone spray-painted gold. 

Well, I’ll get back to it, shall I?  Gardening-wise, I will continue to tell fantastically boring stories about tomatoes and my brother Frank; news-wise, what I try for is complete sentences, and keeping the reader awake.

And if, in either capacity, I seem to lean left or right, please be assured it’s nothing more significant than a temporary imbalance caused by one missing fesse.

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.