It would be a pretty safe bet to say that everyone has had the occasional toilet trouble, the kind where dad runs downstairs to get the plunger and the Drain-o. I don’t think that is a true calamity. For something to be a calamity it has to be really big.
The first four weeks of the past summer flew by at Camp Taconic. Not only because I was having a good time, but also because I was getting hot water in the showers, the toilets kept things down, and so on. Not long after Parents’ Day, disaster struck. It was a small thing, but my bunkmates and I should have heeded the advice the bathroom was giving out: “LEAVE ME ALONE!”
The sink in our common bathroom was attached by a few rusty screws to a piece of balsa wood, sturdy like a rock. I heard it fall, and then I ran onto the porch and saw my friend Ross laughing. Ross has a habit of laughing hysterically at everything, so I figured that nothing major had happened.
While Ross was starting to tear, another friend, Craig, ran out of the bathroom laughing too, only he was soaking wet. I looked in and saw the sink on the floor with water shooting out of the pipe formerly attached to the sink. The floor was soaked and so was everything else. The bathroom had turned on us.
The next day the maintenance men came and fixed the sink. No more than two days later came the worst. Water is one thing, but someone’s lunch is where I draw the line. Someone went to the bathroom and flushed, pretty routine really, but then something happened. Someone shouted, “There’s shit all over the floor!”
I ran to the bathroom door with the rest of the crowd and sure enough, the floor looked like a trodden garden. On top of that was the smell, the smell of every horrible thing imaginable on the floor. Both toilets were rendered unusable.
In addition to that was the cesspool’s equivalent of one of the Great Lakes in the shower. Apparently they were attached to the same pipe. The only thing that was usable in the bathroom was the one unbroken sink, but to get to it you had to maneuver through Lakes Erie, Michigan and Huron. A good time was had by all.
The next day a man from maintenance again came to mend the broken pipe. We were told that it was fixed and there would be no problems, except of course for the psychological damage already inflicted. I couldn’t go in there; only a day before it had taken the appearance of the Wrigley Field bathrooms on a crowded day.
Even so, I pulled myself together and toughed it out for two whole days; that was when the bathroom struck another vicious blow. Same problem, same solution. Apparently when something breaks at a camp and the first solution doesn’t work, they try it again. And again, and again. Our toilets must have broke twice a week for the last three weeks of camp and every time they “fixed” the pipe. Then they let me go home.
Our motto that summer was, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” In reality, though, that wasn’t the case. Life gave us shit, and frankly, shitade does not sound very appetizing. It does, however, build character. Now I can make the best lemonade with the worst lemons because once you’ve been in the shit, nothing is ever as bad as it seems.
