How to Handle Your Shit
“TAKE CARE OF your shit,” people say.
“Handle your shit.”
I thought about this recently while holding a fat, plastic tube–through which my actual shit was flowing, into a hole in the ground at a state park. Five-dollar fee to dump your RV-toilet tank. Pull up, plug in, let it go.
Someday, I’ll stop talking about pooping in a vehicle. Today is not that day.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
In huge dook news: I’ve been pooping in my toilet. That’s what I did when I first moved into my RV, but after a couple of months, in late 2022, I started pooping in buckets, on a farm that composts humanure.
“Did you say, ‘human manure’?” a friend once asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “Well, I said ‘humanure.’ But, yeah. That’s the same.”
All nine of us who lived on the property went to the bathroom in big orange five-gallon Home Depot buckets, which the farm owner emptied into the largest pile of human poo and wood chips the world has ever seen. That is not a fact-checked statement and almost certainly not true, though I don’t see how: The little mountain range it made was around eight feet tall, more than twenty feet long. Multiple times a week, the farm owner spent long hours mixing it with the front-mounted bucket of a huge tractor. The pile steamed against the sky, hot microbial action turning waste into soil. Like any balanced compost, it did not stink.
At all.
The very first story I ever got paid to publish—20 years ago (!), after I mailed a printed copy of it, cold, to Orion magazine—was about composting human poop. The magazine offered me $5o0. When I got the email, I was living in extended exile from Hurricane Katrina, staying with a friend in Ohio. I was alone in her apartment, slow snowflakes falling outside her window, as I read it, electrified by a validation and elation too complex to name. The payment was about 2% of the one I collected on the last story I published before I left my magazine career. But it felt like a king’s ransom.
When I first bought my RV, almost three years ago (!!) now, I met someone who had lived in an RV once and swapped out its standard toilet for a composting one. They told me it was the best $800 they ever spent; all they had to do was pop out the bucket underneath the seat and pull out the compostable bag of composting waste. I’ve since met people who just toss these in the trash. This person went and buried theirs in the woods.
My RV has its original, 26-year-old toilet. It flushes, emptying into a 30-gallon black tank under the carriage. It’s in perfectly working order, but after I moved to the Washington humanure farm, I emptied the tank, cleaned it out, and stopped using it, except for during a few road trips, for years. Even the “Radical” Faerie “sanctuary” where I spent the end of 2023 had outhouses, so for even those several months away from the farm, my black tank stayed poop-free.
(“Who comes and empties the poop in the outhouses?” I asked my friend, the caretaker at the sanctuary, who eventually became my boyfriend, now my ex.
(“The Poop Faeries,” he said.
(“Who are the Poop Faeries?” I asked.
(He replied, airily: “No one knows.”)
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
I returned to the farm the following January. That spring, I paid a company (well, a predatory loan that I took out paid a company) to rebuild my shower. It had a hole in the floor, which I’d successfully patched with Gorilla waterproof tape but still had to keep my weight off while bathing. It was also a color I call “25 years of smoking inside.” A relatively friendly, somewhat hunky dude named Lucas came and, for two days, ripped out the old shower walls and floor, replacing them with a brand-new, gleaming white, custom-sized shower, complete with new fixtures.
It’s the very first new shower I’ve had as an adult, after 20+ years of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on rent, often for housing with old, never-quite-cleanable ones. Once I had my sexy shower, I was less inclined to crowd my little bathroom floor with buckets: one for pooping, another one for storing the peanut-skin fill that went under and on top of waste.
I just wanted, like, a cute, “normal” American bathroom experience.
So I started using my toilet again, full-time. And so, I had to start emptying my sewage.
When I first moved into Bessie, as a person who’d never even driven, let alone owned, an RV, the idea of dealing with my own shit terrified me. But at the first RV park I ever pulled into, some nice lesbians walked me through it, and I saw how simple it was.
How simple some of the steps toward authenticity, however weird, are, once you just give them a try.
Last year, my friend and work-husband, Seth, came to visit me with his wonderful wife and daughter. We met a thousand years ago, when he directed a segment I did for Vice on HBO about therapeutic farms that treat mental illness (yes, I recognize, as I type this, that I am a person with mental illness who now lives on a farm). Seth has a couple of Emmys. He keeps them, as it happens, on the back of his toilet.
When I proposed making a video about dumping my black tank while he was in town, he responded that it was “top-shelf content.”
So here, without further ado, is “Magic Hole”—a little movie about how to empty RV sewage. My friend Chris raved, “So much more enjoyable than I thought a movie about poop would be.”
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