Excrement. That’s what I thought about before I left my apartment and went for a walk this morning.
Unless talking about a baby’s first few poops, it’s a topic most of us avoid. That, death, and taxes. There’s an embarrassment about the whole thing. We light matches to make the smell go away. We’re mildly terrified we’ll clog someone else’s toilet and a plunger won’t be nearby. The concept of sharting is funny because it’s uncomfortably true. We avoid going in public restrooms – unless we have to. When I’m out walking and I see someone’s dog taking a crap, I feel like I should avert my eyes – to give the dog some privacy, because it’s a little unpleasant to watch, and to not make eye contact with the owner who, despite dealing with dog shit twice a day for however long they’ve owned the dog, still looks a little embarrassed. Sometimes we’re downright disgusted by it. Imagine your worst porta-potty experience – it doesn’t take much to call up a visual – an awful stew staring you in the face with a terrible stench. And for all of our embarrassment about the topic, I’m willing to bet everyone takes a look at it just before flushing.
That’s where I was this morning.
What a strange process digestion is. We eat and drink all of these things. Our mouths mash food up into a paste that we swallow. It gets worked on by acids and stomach muscles. Nutrients are absorbed as it gets turned into more of a paste. And whatever can’t be used… excrement. Staring at a pile of poo, it seems terribly inefficient, terribly wasteful. Do I really eat that much? What’s it made of and why don’t I retain more of it? You would think after thousands of years of evolution we’d have gotten a bit closer to being a zero waste machine. Perhaps we’re more efficient than we’ve ever been or more efficient than I imagine us to be. Collectively, we produce a lot of shit (individually between 24,000 lbs and 26,000 lbs of it in a lifetime) – some of us doing more than our fair share… carrying the load, if you will.
As I left my apartment, I shifted my thinking to a more pleasurable topic. I thought a bit about food and taste. If our digestive system seems wasteful, the notion of taste seems perfectly designed. And what a strange transformation from the joy of eating good food to… well, that other thing at the end of the process. Imagine if all of the things we had to eat tasted like shit. I suppose we might not notice. Did our tastes evolve to enjoy the foods accessible to us? Was the food always tasty – is it designed that way so that we don’t die of starvation? I’m not one to believe in the miracle of god or some grand watchmaker…. yet, the world seems designed for us or we’re designed / well-adapted for it.
When I got down to the river, there was a crane on a barge and another barge full of rocks. The crane was scooping the rocks off the barge and into the water along the banks. I assume it’s part of a multi-million dollar erosion / restoration project. On the other side of the river there were several more barges full of rocks. I slowed my walk to watch. Even though the barges were big and the crane was good sized too, the whole operation seemed small compared to the river, the landscape, the cities and states. Every year, tiny humans get in to their bulldozers and backhoes and barges. They dig rocks here and dump them there. They actively change the shape of the land and riverbanks and horizon. Despite all of this activity, geography has its own plans. The river washes the rocks away, wears them down, tumbles them smooth.
Watching all of this, I was amazed by the ingenuity of it – we’ve built barges with cranes and shovels specifically for this purpose. Each of those machines have precisely engineered smaller machine parts. All of it fits together. But it was hard not to think of the futility of it. Human ego and frailty and our individual time on this earth seem pretty insignificant compared to our rivers and oceans. I walked and carried that thought for a bit. I began to wonder about the scope of human history and endeavor. Wars and monuments. Entire cities built then buried or leveled. I wondered how many bodies have been digested by this river? The worst maritime disaster on the Mississippi happened on April 27, 1865 when the steamboat, Sultana, sank just north of Memphis. Close to 1,700 people died. The park I walk through, Tom Lee Park, is named after an African-American river worker who in 1925 used his skiff to make five trips to a capsized vessel and saved 32 people. 23 people died in that accident.
What happens to all of those bodies? When you think of the breadth of human history – all the beginnings and all the endings, the volume of it seems beyond comprehension. fivethirtyeight.com, with the help of demographer Carl Haub, estimates that 100,825,272,791 people have ever died. All the water those bodies have carried returns to the water of our oceans, seas, and rivers… the molecular goo goes back to being molecular goo. With numbers that big, it’s hard to feel terribly significant, or that our day-to-day problems really amount to much. Which seems all the more reason to enjoy the time we have… love fearlessly, be kind, don’t sweat it, and maybe spend a little less time staring at our own shit before it all gets flushed away.