Growing up as a hippie family wasn't quite enough for my parents, so I grew up in a hippie community. Seven families in our rural Vancouver Island area bought a fourteen-acre piece of property together in the early 1970s, and everyone helped each other build their houses out of scrap lumber and recycled nails. No one put locks on their doors, and us kids (eleven altogether) lived from house to house, eating whatever oat-bran-sprout-carob cookies whichever tie-dyed braid-and-bandana-wearing mother passed to us on our way through. (My first groceries after moving away from home were Cocoa Puffs cereal and chocolate-fudge Pop Tarts.)
The nice thing about the 'community' was that although we may not have fit in, we at least had each other. However, even among our group, my family seemed to be the last to do anything—we were the last to get electricity, hot running water, a TV, an electric stove, and a flush toilet. Somehow, everyone in the neighbourhood was lucky enough to have a real flush toilet but me, and the greatest pain I suffered as a hippie child was the lack of a water-guzzling piece of porcelain.
At first the outhouse was outside and away from the house, but things got worse when my dad devised a digester system in the basement and moved the 'toilet' onto the porch. The digester system was a giant barrel that boiled and bubbled, and which eventually filtered stuff through an underground hose into the garden. Waste not, want not. This meant that we couldn't throw toilet paper into the pot, which was brilliant in the eyes of my parents, since it gave us the opportunity to save our used toilet paper in a basket to be employed later in starting the fire (naturally, our only source of heat). Nothing was a secret in our bathroom. A glance into the basket told you anything you might want to know about the regularity or health of your housemates. Yikes.
Dad eventually built a real bathroom (with a real bathtub, although still no hot running water), and he moved his toilet into it. The toilet was a square box with a regular toilet seat on it, except that the seat was glued to the box, and the lid weighed a ton because of the 'seal' Dad had built onto the underside of it. This was supposed to keep the smell to a minimum. The toilet bowl looked like a funnel, which led down to the digester, and you had to hope that your 'business' headed in the right direction, or a bit of manoeuvring with a stick would be necessary. Cripes.
Still, all of this was bearable—a little embarrassing at birthday parties, but bearable—until I hit my teens. I avoided bringing school friends over on the weekends, and I hated—loathed—the fact that everyone in my house knew every bit of action going on in my confused teenage body. One day, I accidentally dropped a feminine hygiene product down the chute, and although I longed desperately to ignore it, I knew I had to tell Dad. He had to break into the digester and fish it out, and since, at fourteen, everything that happened on the planet was about me, this was the ultimate humiliation. I never even considered how awful it must have been for Dad, but in true hippie fashion, he was as laidback as ever.
My worst moment of longing for a flush toilet was when I brought my first boyfriend home at the age of fifteen. Even now, the memory brings back that lurch in my stomach and a flush to my cheeks as I hear Lon ask the dreaded question, "Where's the bathroom?" Oh, the horror. I felt sick and hot, and I wanted to ask him if he could just hold it, but instead I pointed the way and didn't say a word. Of course, my parents didn't think anything of it, chatting and carrying on as if the world wasn't about to end, while I stood shell-shocked, waiting for Lon to emerge from the bathroom and tell me that he couldn't see me anymore.
When he did come out, he looked embarrassed, and I looked embarrassed, and we never, ever mentioned it again. We dated for almost a year, and he surprisingly never listed the lack of a flush toilet among his reasons for breaking it off (although I secretly suspected it was on the unspoken list, along with "and I can't stomach one more of your Mom's rice-flour-carob-oat-cakes"). Another teenage romance down the pipes, and no thanks to hippie life.
Well. The part of the story that is silent—the part I only acknowledge now— is that the digester fertilized a garden that fed us good vegetables, and a lawn (of sorts) that we lolled in on hot summer days, slurping on home-made orange juice popsicles. We learned not to waste water, and we learned that the accepted way of doing things is not the only way of doing things. We learned to think critically and creatively by watching Dad invent our household out of bits and pieces of scavenged junk, and it has served both my sister and I well in our lives. We are both known as problem solvers, and my work partner calls me her 'engineer' because I can always rig something up when we come across a problem.
The house now has hot water, electric heat, home electronics, and everything else you could imagine in a modern household, including a plain, white, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary flush toilet. I sometimes think my dad waited to install it until I was nearly over the embarrassment of it all, just as a character-building exercise.
It's difficult for me to look back on any part of my childhood now without some degree of gratitude and sentimentality. As I get older and realize what kind of dysfunction can exist in a family, I see that my fear of a flushless toilet was a blessing if it was the greatest thing I had to worry about. My embarrassment has turned to pride as I marvel at my father's ingenuity. I think it's appropriate that his ashes now fertilize a Japanese maple in the same yard that we all fertilized as a family for so many years. Sometimes when I visit Mom and use the bathroom, I laugh as I flush the toilet, remembering how achingly I longed for it as a teenager; and I cry as I now care not one whit about it, but long instead for another minute with him.
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