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About the book:

"Life on the Run: Toilet Tales and Other Atrocities"

About the three hour mark, I began to feel a pinch in my butt.

Where are the bathrooms?

Lake Titicaca Stone Toilet

About the book, "Life on the Run: Toilet Tales and Other Atrocities.”

Part life and travel, part human disasters, part laughter and part the horror stories of human waste removal, this book is a nonfiction collection of vignettes: memories and travel journals woven with toilets as their thread. It’s about 60,000 words of outrageous adventures.

It leads through the midcentury farms and mountains of the US, the coastal desert and jungles of Peru and Colombia, dark holes of the former Soviet Empire, shifting sands of Mongolia. It presents the stench of trench toilets, the massive squares in outhouses in the Danube Delta, the bucket brigades of Viet Nam, Polish Toilet Police and more.

Throughout ages and continents man has devised ways to cope with human waste. Genghis Khan’s army was able to move like a blitzkrieg across Central Asia and Europe because they drank the blood from the necks of their horses and slept mounted, traveling at speed. So how did they relieve themselves? They urinated and defecated at full gallop. No wonder the terrified citizens of walled towns could smell them three days before they arrived. Vespasian saved the Roman Empire by taxing urine. The ancient Chinese bred hogs to eat human feces.

No matter who you are, the one constant in your life is bodily waste removal. As long as you live a consistent daily life this is an activity you hardly notice. But get one degree off plumb, one angle off the beaten path of your life, and you hazard falling into the rabbit hole, tumbling through the dark into the unknown, and being cast into surprise, awe, embarrassment, even confusion and mortification. If you can laugh you might survive.

My life is so tangled with toilet misadventures it’s hard to tell the space between them. I promised myself I would someday, baring complete shutdown of all my systems, write a journal based on the toilet traumas and encounters in my life and travels. Of course, my husband preferred that I wait until all his systems had shut down before I did so. I beat him to it.

This book holds tales gleaned through eight decades, across five continents. It is about where and how I have found the means and devises we use to deposit human waste. Along the way you will meet peoples, places and cultures. You will join the people of Almaty who when they could not afford toilet paper in their museums toilets, presented carefully cut and folded newspaper on custom hangers.

You will see peoples in the far reaches of the former Soviet Union squat in trench toilets under a slat shed while Andean peoples squat in open fields. In the meantime, the Germans may want you to carry out your used paper in plastic zip bags.

You will see the dreaded Red Eye in a city sewer and a grizzly hibernating in an Alaskan privy, a Peruvian outhouse taken over by vampire bats. You may have to travel through mud or snow, down paths of dust or overgrown weeds, in storms or blowing rain. You will come upon roosters with steak knives for talons and grizzly bears as big as tents, detritus of exploded bombs and frightful women in black scarves on their head and hair on their chin, terrorism in Italy and massacre in Cambodia, prostitution in Rome and bandits in the jungles of Colombia, abandoned secret Soviet bases. But eventually, somewhere, you will find a toilet, or it’s equal, so hang on. These rabbit holes run deep.

To read an excerpt from the book, scroll down

At the first grunt of the beast shouldering his way into the tent...

About the three hour mark, I began to feel a pinch in my butt.

Where are the bathrooms?

Lake Titicaca Stone Toilet

The Danube Delta (Excerpt)

The best series of toilet tales lurks in the Danube Delta of Romania.

The Danube rises in the Black Forest in Germany, and after coursing 1,770 miles through eight countries, it spreads into a vast wetland that covers 1,665 square miles and grows seaward at the rate of eighty to a hundred feet per year into the Black Sea. The Europeans consider it one of the last remaining wildernesses in Europe. The Romanians burst with pride that it has won a place on UNESCO's World Heritage List and is protected under the Danube Bioreserve. Yet Ceausescu mined it, harvested it, developed it, dredged it, settled it and marketed it as a major tourist resort area.

We left Tulcea on our way to the Black Sea in a fishing boat with a biosphere expert (also our translator), a cook and a captain. The boat was somewhat primitive, but it had all the necessities: kitchen, deck, toilet. It even had a couple of bunks, but they were for the crew. Our destination, besides the Black Sea, was villages in route, to stay in B&B’s.

It was late afternoon when we arrived in the tiny village of Mila Twenty-three.

I cannot begin to convey the astonishment that I felt. Here was a village so primitive that I had almost no reference for it. And yet it had been a major tourist destination during the Soviet era. It wasn't even urbanized: nothing more than a cluster of houses, with reed stockade networks growing out from the main houses. There were no roads. Dust and dirt paths of varying width took their place. It had no road access, and no vehicles. There were no street or exterior lights. No indoor toilets. Anywhere. There was no commercial center, no market. One house with its outbuilding, outhouse and garden was built against the next, separated by reed or plank fencing. Chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys waddled across the paths and into the pools of water that stood in place of ponds or lakes. Snakes, lizards, toads and salamanders cluttered the paths and weeds sprouted at the edge of the dust backed by a "stockade" fence.

That first night we were hosted in a B&B nestled in a garden of tall colorful flowers. Watering hoses crawled along the pathways like long black snakes. Outside the house there was an open kitchen covered with a canvas roof where we enjoyed the first of about 200 fish-meals. There was a broken piece of mirror positioned over a dripping water tank: for shaving, one assumed. And to our horror, when we asked about the facilities, as there were none in evidence, we were led proudly inside the chicken yard.

Nestled in among the chicken makeshift coops was a tall nearly square knot of reeds, leaning precariously and reminiscent of the long abandoned outhouses on the flat landscapes of the Midwest, but it had no halfmoon on the ragged door. Inside, there was a square opening in the floor that was no less than eighteen inches on all sides. There was no light, even a candle. I immediately, then and there, determined to not leave the bed until it was light enough to see. The idea of death by chicken or falling through a privy hole and sinking into the fermenting abyss was enough to keep the bed dry.

Even better, of all the toilets in the Delta, the one on the boat was best.

It was off the deck three steps down to the right. About four-foot square, it housed a tiny sink, which you could reach from the stool if there was a need, and a porthole, which was located strategically to the right of the stool so that you could see out as you sat.

Thing was, in order to get onto the stool, which sat about two feet off the floor, you had to make this amazing move, bending your body almost double and scoot your bum up onto the stool which was about two feet from the ceiling. Bob called it the “docking maneuver.” From there you stayed bent double. (Peering out the porthole for entertainment if you wished.)

Other thing was, since it was open down to the water, if you chose the wrong weather or direction to use the facilities, you got the douche of your life.

The water in the sink (which was a maximum of three feet from the stool) came straight out of the river. It was important to know which way the boat was going before washing your hands.