The Big Necessity Read online

  Solving sanitation is also a noble pursuit, if the number of royals who are interested in it is an indication: Prince Charles of the House of Windsor cleans his wastewater naturally by sending it slowly through a pond filled with reeds. King Bhumibol of Thailand holds a patent for a wastewater aerator, making him the only patent-holding monarch in the world. Prince Willem-Alexander of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne, leads the UN’s sanitation advisory body. It takes a brave academic to address it, but the ones who do rise to the occasion, producing papers like “My Baby Doesn’t Smell as Bad as Yours: The Plasticity of Disgust,” by the psychologists Trevor Case, Betty Repacholi, and Richard Stevenson; or “The Scatological Rites of Burglars” by Albert B. Friedman, a noted professor of medieval literature, who must have been tickled to learn that the housebreaker’s habit of leaving a foul deposit is probably an ancient custom, and was alluded to in seventeenth-century German literature.

  If the cultural standing of excrement doesn’t convince them, I say that the material itself is as rich as oil and probably more useful. It contains nitrogen and phosphates that can make plants grow and also suck the life from water because its nutrients absorb available oxygen. It can be both food and poison. It can contaminate and cultivate. Millions of people cook with gas made by fermenting it. I tell them I don’t like to call it “waste,” when it can be turned into bricks, when it can make roads or jewelry, and when in a dried powdered form known as poudrette it was sniffed like snuff by the grandest ladies of the eighteenth-century French court. Medical men of not too long ago thought stool examination a vital diagnostic tool (London’s Wellcome Library holds a 150-year-old engraving of a doctor examining a bedpan and a sarcastic maid asking him if he’d like a fork). They were also fond of prescribing it: excrement could be eaten, drunk, or liberally applied to the skin. Martin Luther was convinced: he reportedly ate a spoonful of his own excrement daily and wrote that he couldn’t understand the generosity of a God who freely gave such important and useful remedies.

  This may seem like quackery, except that the fecal transplant is becoming an increasingly common procedure in modern medicine, used to treat severe bacterial infections such as Clostridium difficile, known by tabloids as a “superbug” because of its resistance to many antibiotic remedies. For the worst-suffering cases, doctors can now prescribe an enema—mixed with milk or saline solution—of a close relative’s disease-free feces, whose bacterial fauna somehow defeat the superbug with dramatic effect. (Ninety percent of patients given fecal transfusions recover.) An eighty-three-year-old Scottish granny named Ethel McEwen, freshly cured by a dose provided by her daughter, said it wasn’t much different from a blood or kidney transplant, and anyway, “it’s not like they put it on a plate and have you eat it. You don’t ever see or smell a thing.”

  My sales technique nearly always worked. One evening over beer, an Indian novelist asked with seemingly bored politeness what I was working on, then talked for an hour of New Zealand “long-drops” (deep pit latrines) and whether it is acceptable to answer the phone while on the toilet, a modern question of etiquette that defeats me. My neighbor’s elderly mother reminisced about the outdoor privy she had as a child, and about the man who called to collect the urine, which he then sold to tanners, and she sounded as if she misses both. Pub conversations regularly took a toilet turn: a regular greeted me one day by saying that he only urinated sitting down. An expression of relief crossed his face, before he turned back to his pint.

  To research The Bathroom, an exhaustive exploration of human toilet habits, the architect Alexander Kira surveyed 1,000 Californians. In an article he wrote for Time headlined “Examining the Unmentionables,” Kira said, “Once people got talking about bathrooms they couldn’t stop.”

  The toilet is a physical barrier that takes care of the physical dangers of excrement. Language takes care of the social ones. In The Civilizing Process, the anthropologist Norbert Elias charted the progression of human defecation from a public, unremarkable activity—it was considered an honor to attend monarchs seated on their commodes—to a private, shameful one, done behind closed doors and, except in China, never in company. Newspapers are fond of anointing last taboos, but in modern civilized times the defecatory practice of humans is undeniably a candidate. Sex can be talked about, probably because it usually requires company. Death has once again become conversational, enough to be given starring roles in smart, prime-time TV dramas. Yet defecation remains closed behind the words, all chosen for their clean association, that we now use to keep the most animal aspect of our bodies in the backyards of our discourse, where modernity has decided it belongs. Water closet. Bathroom. Restroom. Lavatory. Sometimes, we add more barriers by borrowing from other people’s languages. The English took the French toilette (a cloth), and used it first to describe a cover for a dressing table, then a dressing room, then the articles used in the dressing room, and finally, but only in the nineteenth century, a place where washing and dressing was done, and then neither washing nor dressing. (They also borrowed gardez l’eau, commonly shouted before throwing the contents of chamber pots into the streets, and turned it into “loo.”) The French, in return, began by calling their places of defecation “English places” (lieux à l’anglaise) and then took the English acronym WC (water closet) instead. The Japanese have dozens of native words for a place of defecation but prefer the Japanese-English toiretto. You have to go back to the Middle Ages to find places of defecation given more accurate and poetic names: Many a monk used a “necessary house.” Henry VIII installed a House of Easement at his Hampton Court Palace. The easiest modern shorthand for the disposal of the disposal of human excreta—sanitation—is a euphemism for defecation which is a euphemism for excretion which is a euphemism for shitting. This is why the young boy hero of Dr. Seuss’s It’s Grinch Night can ask for permission “to go to the euphemism.” This is why the only safe place for modern humans to talk about defecation is in the unthreatening embrace of humor, and why the ordinary, basic activity of excretion has been invested with an emotional power that has turned a natural function into one of our strongest taboo words.

  Our disgust with shit seems deep and sure, as potent as the swear words that get their power from it. There are good biological reasons for this. Feces are unpleasant. Outside the sexual fetish world of coprophagy, no one wants to smell, feel, or touch them (including me). But the power of our taboo words is modern. Church words used to hurt much more. The diminished power of “damn” explains why the climax of Gone With the Wind is always a bit of a puzzle. When church influence weakened, the products of the body—which Puritan influence has successfully turned into a foul, shameful thing—stepped in instead to give us our worst words. There must be something wrong with it, after all, when all we do is get rid of it as fast as possible.

  Meanwhile, a plentiful supply of euphemisms can serve as linguistic stand-ins. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker lists a dozen categories of euphemism, including taboo (shit), medical (stool, bowel movement) and formal (feces, excrement, excreta, defecation, ordure). The category that’s missing is “conversational.” There is no neutral word for what humans produce at least once a day, usually unfailingly. There is no defecatory equivalent of the inoffensive, neutral “sex.”

  I wish that “shit” didn’t shock. It is a word with noble roots, coming from a family of words that also contains the Greek skihzein, the Latin scindere, or the Old English scitan, all meaning, sooner or later, to divide or separate. (Science is the art of distinguishing things by knowledge.) I use it, sometimes, because of a frustration with all those euphemisms. Feces is the Latin word for dregs and only took on its modern meaning in the seventeenth century. Any proponent of ecological sanitation—the reuse, via composting or some other means, of human excrement—will object to a potentially powerful and inexhaustible fertilizer being thought “the most worthless parts.” They also object to “waste” because it derives from the Latin for “uncultivated,” and because it shouldn’t
be wasted.

  But mostly I use the word because throughout my travels the people who deal with things best are the ones who are not afraid of it. In the words of Umesh Panday, a Nepali sanitation activist, “Just as HIV/AIDS cannot be discussed without talking frankly about sex, so the problem of sanitation cannot be discussed without talking frankly about shit.”

  One evening in Bangkok, I attend a party. It’s the end of a long day, and the Toilet Party is supposed to calm spirits and foster connections, because it is being held as part of the World Toilet Organization’s 2006 Expo. The Thais treat the conference with respect, perhaps because of their beloved king’s interest in wastewater aerators; a couple of hundred Thai delegates have been summoned from various government departments, from all over the country.

  On the stage, traditional Thai dancers, with tapering fingers and extreme beauty, manage to glide with a serenity undiminished by the toilets that serve as a backdrop. As the entertainment proceeds, the attendees mingle over buffet food. A Japanese man who speaks no English, but who proffers a business card declaring himself a “household paper historian,” tries to converse with a world authority on public toilets who speaks no Japanese. The man in charge of Bangkok’s sewage disposal has an earnest discussion with a Sri Lankan who has spent two years building low-cost latrines for tsunami victims. A man with a moustache introduces himself as a TV star in Malaysia. He’s a TV cop. “Actually, the Malaysian equivalent of Starsky, as in Hutch.” Here, over canapés, is everything that intrigues me about this hidden human activity. Dedicated people, derided but determined, toasting their unheralded efforts to solve the world’s biggest unsolved public health crisis, because who else, outside this world, will do it for them?

  By the time of the party, I have had a professional curiosity in human excreta disposal for several months. I’ve noticed something strange happening. I read a piece about the Austrian director Michael Haneke in the New York Times and he suddenly says, out of nowhere, “We have a saying in Austria: we are already up to our necks in sewage. Let’s not make waves.” I turn on the TV with no program in mind and find a documentary about W. H. Auden, and the first talking head is saying how Auden’s guests were only allowed one sheet of toilet paper because any more was wasteful (I liked Auden already; I like him more now that I know this). On a train traveling through France one day, I become immersed in a book for hours. The first time I look out of the window, I see a sewage treatment plant in the middle of a green field. Psychologists call this a perception filter. Once you notice something, you notice it everywhere. Our most basic bodily function, and how we choose to deal with it, leaves its signs everywhere entwined with everything, as intricately intimate with human life as sewers are with the city. Under our feet, at the edge of sight, but there.

  Once I start noticing, I can’t stop. And once I start meeting the people who work in this world—who flush its sewers and build its pit latrines, who invent and engineer around our essential essence, in silence and disregard—I don’t want to. I’d rather follow Sigmund Freud, who wrote that humanity’s “wiser course would undoubtedly have been to admit [shit’s] existence and dignify it as much as nature will allow.” So here goes.

  _________________

  East 21st Street, between Broadway and Park Avenue

  (New York City Department of Environmental Protection)

  IN THE SEWERS

  THE ART OF DRAINAGE

  ______________

  Beside a manhole in an East London street, a man named Happy hands over the things that will protect me in the hours to come: white paper overalls, with hood. Crotch-high waders with tungsten-studded soles that will grip but won’t spark. A hard hat with a miner’s light. Heavy rubber gloves, oversized. A “turtle”—a curved metal box containing an emergency breathing apparatus—to strap around my waist, along with a backup battery. Finally, a safety harness that Happy helps me buckle with delicacy, as it loops through my legs near my groin. It’s tight but comfortable, and has the side benefit for male wearers of making all men seem rather well endowed. The harness will be the only means of dragging me out from the sewer into which I am about to descend, where the hazards include bacteria and viruses such as hepatitis A, B, and C; rabies and typhoid; and leptospirosis (“sewer workers’ disease”) that can be caught from rat urine, and in its severe form causes vomiting, jaundice, and death.

  There are also the gases. Methane, obviously. Hydrogen sulphide, known as sewer gas, which forms when organic matter decomposes in sewage, smells like rotten eggs and kills by asphyxiation. And whatever fumes arise from whichever effluents London’s commercial businesses choose to pour down their drains and toilets today, with proper warning or not. The greatest danger is the flow, which can be increased suddenly and rapidly with rainfall, so a stream becomes a torrent, and one that can contain anything that has been put down it that day, from two-by-fours to pieces of four-by-fours. Sewer workers have always died on the job, and they still die, no matter how advanced the infrastructure. In March 2006, Minnesota sewer workers Joe Harlow and Dave Yasis drowned in the St. Paul sewer system when a rainstorm came on suddenly.

  Water can be dangerous in other ways: sugar manufacturers, for example, send into the sewer the boiling water that they clean their vats with. Underground, it turns into steam and can react unhappily with other gases in the system. Sewers that are known to be particularly hazardous are ranked C-class and cannot be entered without special permits. Though the men accompanying me have worked in the sewers for decades, they cannot know every inch of a vast network nor what is likely to be discharged into it. Some sewers haven’t been visited in fifteen years. It’s best to be prepared. And indemnified: a paper-suited man thrusts a form at me as I struggle with my crotch-high waders (items of clothing that would make members of the online Yahoo! sewer-boots fetish group—which does exist—speechless with one emotion or another). He says, “Sign this,” and gives me no time to read it. “Don’t worry,” he says, with no smile. “It just means if you collapse, I get all your money.” This humor helps in a hard job, and there will be more of it.

  Half a dozen men stand around the manhole. They match well enough the London journalist Henry Mayhew’s description of their predecessors in 1851: “Well-conducted men generally, and for the most part, fine stalwart good-looking specimens of the English laborer,” though the size of their paunches shows that they’ve moved on from the traditional sewerman’s tipple of rum to beer. They all seem to have very white teeth.

  My escorts include one consultant, one senior engineer, and several wastewater operatives. Their names are Dave and Keith and Rob and Happy, but in the language of those who work in the city’s sewers, they’re all flushers. The name is no longer used officially, because it describes the job in times past when men waded into the silt of a sewer and dislodged blockages with brooms and rakes, and opened inlets to flush river water into the tunnels to nudge the flow down into the Thames. They’re wastewater operatives now, but they do what the flushers did: they keep the flow flowing.

  Their equipment is better than the heavy blue overcoats and wick lamps that flushers used a century ago, but the men are fewer. If you look at the sewer systems of great cities, you’ll start to think there’s something wrong with the math. New York’s 6,000 miles of sewers are served by 300 flushers. Paris has 1,500 miles and 284 égoutiers. The mightiest network of any metropolitan city is London’s. It is so mighty, no one knows how big it is. Thames Water, the private water utility that serves London, has 37,000 miles of sewers in its whole catchment, but that extends 80 miles from central London to Swindon. As for the length of the sewers under the metropolis, there was no precise answer to be had, beyond “a lot.” The number of flushers is a less slippery figure. At the time of my visit, it was 39. Thames Water claims more efficient equipment has reduced manpower needs. The flushers see it differently, muttering about outside contractors doing the job that only they know how to do best, and about asset-stripping in the boardroom. There we
re personnel cuts after the UK’s water companies were privatized in 1989, and Thames Water is now on its third owner in nineteen years. Debates rage still about the wisdom of privatizing companies responsible for providing, in many eyes, an essential public good that costs money to clean and supply.

  All the flushers know is that they’re heading toward retirement, that the sewer knowledge they carry in their heads is irreplaceable (and unwritten), and that they could use some more staff, though only men like themselves. Sewers have always been a man’s world. In London, they’re a white, working-class man’s world. There are few jobs left that are as monochrome and monosexual. There are female engineers who do sewer surveys, sometimes. But no one can remember a woman applying to be a flusher. Even black London cab drivers—who share the banter, skin color, and accents of the flushers—have reluctantly welcomed some women. But flushers are not cab drivers, and they’ve chosen, over the mapped roads above, these mostly unmapped and significantly more dangerous conduits, thoroughfares, and bypasses below.

  The boundaries of this world are trunk sewers and brick, but they’re also the exclusivity of a marginalized occupation. In a scene from Boys from the Brown Stuff, a BBC documentary on flusher life, a new flusher tries to chat up a young woman outside a nightclub. He makes the mistake of telling her what his job is. The scene looks set up but her disgust is genuine. “Does it involve feces and such? I’m glad I didn’t get you to buy me a drink, then.”

  It’s 10 P.M. now. Night is a good time to enter sewers, when businesses—which contribute the biggest volume of waste—have closed. Night is when dangerous sewers are as safe as they can be. This first sewer is safer still, because the flow has been diverted to allow us access. It would be only a meter or so high normally because the Fleet sewer, formed when the filthy River Fleet was enclosed with brick, isn’t one of the bigger ones. Some tunnels are several meters in diameter and wide enough to drive a Mini Cooper through. Some are barrel-shaped, some shaped like Wild West wagon canopies. The Fleet is a brick egg. (Elliptical shapes are strong and encourage the flow of water.)