Birds and Bathrooms
Hi, I’m Sasha - and I write nomadic stories. Each Monday, I send out a travel anecdote that will take you 3 minutes or less to read.
You can check out one of my rougher memories here, or check out what water is like as we travel across the road.
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Birds and Bathrooms
I often say that while I’m not homeless, I am houseless. Living in a motorhome has huge advantages. The disadvantages? They’re peculiar.
For most maintenance items that you need fixing in a static house, you call someone, and they come to you. Electricians, plumbers, fix-it people. But my house is a vehicle. So I take my home to have work done to it like most people do a car. Unlike cars, we don’t rent a house when ours isn’t available, and there’s currently no Lyft for RVers™ (patent pending.)
Before the pandemic, when we’d have work done on our motorhome, we’d pile the dog into our car and find a cafe to work at while eating lunch or browse a bookstore to fill the hours.
Now, it means sitting in the car in a parking lot. Without a bathroom. Or access to a kitchen. Or much at all.
Last week, we finally made it to the mecca of motorhome repair. We checked our home into a repair bay and sat in our car before we decided to go for a drive to a town 45 minutes away. That’s when I realized: I had to pee. Really badly. And we were on a freeway in farmland. (For non-farm coastal people like us, that translates to no trees or bushes.) We made it to the town, found a park, and assumed there would be a restroom. No such luck. That’s when we saw a bright blue box across the street at a construction site. Miraculously there were no construction workers there, so I checked for traffic on the potholed street and half-danced across the road. I slammed the plastic blue door open, then promptly slammed it back shut.
Something was in there, but the white handle had a bright green “open” sign.
I whipped the door back open and stepped back on the broken up concrete slabs. A fluttery bird was banging his wings and head on the blue plastic walls inside.
“C’mon,” I said aloud, “it’s my turn.”
The little blue bird skittered past me to a more serene bathroom in the open sky.
This was definitely a squat scenario. The bird was really bad at aiming - so bird poop was all over the seat, and, uh, the entire portapotty interior.
Lesson learned. Don’t drink tons of water if you don’t want to share your portapotty with a frantic finch. Still not sure how someone initially let him in, but didn’t have the decency to let the dang bird out.*
Today, as I write this, it’s my birthday. I stood on the scale as one does on their birthday, to welcome the year with a slight sense of fattiness and failure. Above me was a fan with a clear cover that opens to the outside world. A tiny chirp came down through the fan, and when I looked up, I saw the belly of a bright red bird, saying “good morning.”
I guess he also needed to use the bathroom.
Thanks for traveling with me this week, hope you enjoyed a lighter snippet than last week’s Trash Panda episode.
-Sasha
Rabbit hole time: It’s fairly common for birds to go down into the pipe that many porta potties have that help with the smell - and then get stuck inside. You can read more here about a new program aiming to protect wildlife from getting stuck in outdoor bathrooms.