Essay de Nécessité

I must start off with a disclaimer. This is not an essay for the niminy-piminy puritanical prig. If you are averse to honest descriptions of bodily excretions or the foul messes of grown adults, please click away from here now. However, with that said, like most bowel movements, the following piece of writing is both urgent and necessary. Nature is calling. And just as it quite often does, nature stinks.

Over two years ago now, when Sydney and I decided to leave Los Angeles for the cow-speckled hills of Washington County, NY, to operate the Owl Pen, we had unsullied visions of buying, sorting, and selling antiquarian books and ephemera to loyal local customers and adventuresome collectors vacationing upstate. We imagined there would be dust and cobwebs to clear off some of our product. Occasionally we’d have to dispose of some mousey critters before they made comfy homes of our shelves. We’d enlist the help of a barn cat and a trusty hound-like puppy and the world would look like some animated Disney film our five-year old daughter would watch, where animals talk to one another and sing songs, and no creatures ever get killed, and no character, however true to life, ever seems to defecate. Don’t get me wrong, we had owned pets back in Los Angeles, and assumed we’d be cleaning up after them, placing their partially solid waste in biodegradable plastic bags. We did not expect, however, to be doing the same for our customers.

The former owner, Edie Brown, a now trusted friend and consultant on all aspects of the store’s operation, had advised us before opening for our first season to invest in a composting toilet. Edie and her late husband Hank had run the Owl Pen and had been custodians of its customer bathroom—the Chalet de Nécessité—for thirty years. The original owner, Barbara Probst, who opened the store in 1960, believed enough wayward souls would be wandering up to her book barn to browse the stacks for hours, that she must provide them with some civilized place to relieve themselves. So she had a pre-built ten-by-twelve shed trucked in and set on a concrete slab to be the store restroom. Only slightly more dignified than a typical outhouse, the Chalet had a plywood wall running through that made for a private stall where one could do their business in what was essentially a metal bucket complete with a seat for keeping them from falling in. A pail filled with water was at the opposite side of the shed where one could was their hands after, to complete the rustic experience. Edie told us every week or so for years she’d have to carry this rusty bucket out to a hole Hank had dug behind the store to empty the putrid waste of customers. There were a few reasons she wanted to retire and sell us the Owl Pen, but this had to be on the list of things for which she’d grown tired. Her advice came from experience. “You should get one of those new composting toilets.”

So we did.

Sydney did her online research and picked the top-rated outdoor composting throne. The price was a bit steep at $1000. We thought, of all things, this was a necessary investment—only the best for our customers. It wasn’t long before we began to regret our purchase.

Our handyman Dan helped us install the drain pipe that ran out the back of the toilet through the wall of the Chalet into the ground. A few feet below the earth, a submerged stream of customer’s pee would run, permeating the ground surrounding the structure. At least, that was what we hoped would happen.

We should have known we were in for trouble on our first opening weekend, when one of our loyal customers, an elderly gentleman with a metal walker, the kind with tennis balls on the foot of each leg, returned from a trip to the chalet with the look of a child who knows they did something wrong but attempts to hide their guilt in fear of a reprimand. “That’s some complicated toilet you have there!” he said with a nervous chuckle, rolling his eyes. I decided to check and see what had or hadn’t happened. Just as I’d suspected, he had peed all over the floor, smeared excrement on the seat, and left a big fat turd on the plastic trap covering the hole in the toilet tank.

It didn’t take long to intuit when the Chalet needed to be cleaned. A person would come out looking dazed, bewildered, with a slight hint of concern that would fade from their face as they found their way back to the stacks to browse. The job became for us to find a way to discreetly dart out to the Chalet to clean up after the customer, so as not to embarrass them. Over time, this would become increasingly difficult.

Weeks and months passed, and these fowl occurrences continued regularly and we began to ask ourselves three questions.

The first was “Why is it so difficult for people to figure out how to use this toilet?” This was easily answered. The toilet was designed poorly. In order to open the trap where all of the waste should have gone, one needed to sit on the seat. The pressure from a fully committed tush was necessary to avoid a mess. Now any grown adult of a certain social class could tell you that at least half the human race will not place their exposed buttocks on a public restroom toilet seat. Not to generalize, but let’s face it, many mothers teach their daughters to hover over the bowl starting from a young age.

Another issue with this piss-poor potty was that it required men to sit to pee. This didn’t seem like too much of an ask for the two or three dudes who used the Chalet on any given day. However, the place for the men’s business was located at the front of the bowl, where many of our patrons, both men and women, would accidentally leave used toilet paper, clogging the drain. This was due to the aforementioned seat issue. If one did not sit on the throne, there was no other place to discard the paper.

After a few weeks of frequent cleanings consisting of mopping up urine from the floor, pulling used TP from the drain, and wiping off poop from the whole contraption, we decided to post more signs. We thought, if customers could see specific instructions on every wall of the bathroom, surely that would solve our problem.

The second question seemed a simpler one, possibly one of ethical concerns. And that was, “Why would anyone who comes to our bookstore, a person of such refined taste, extremely literate, with such a degree of intellect, think it completely acceptable to leave their fecal matter splattered about the Chalet de Nécessité?” Yes, it’s a glorified outhouse, but we take pride in keeping it clean. We provide paper towels and hand soap alongside a portable sink that must be filled with water every few days. On the little table that holds these items, beside the covered garbage can, are some bottles of cleaning products that no one has ever thought to use. Though it gets used on average about three to five times a day, the Chalet is often treated like a Penn Station restroom. This conundrum is a dangerous rabbit hole to go down because in the extreme it can lead to a complete dissolution of any faith in humanity, and at the very least turn one into a bitter curmudgeon of a bookshop owner. Best to reckon with mysteries more easily resolved, like, say, quantum mechanics.

The third thought came hard and fast like nature’s call. We have a six-year-old daughter and we live at least a good fifteen to twenty minute drive away from civilization, so a common things we find ourselves saying is “Did you go potty? You should go before we leave.” If we’re headed out on longer excursion, “Are you sure? You’re sure you don’t have to? You should try. We’re not stopping anywhere.” One would think most full-grown adults would ask themselves similar questions…. Especially if they were on a day trip to the Washington County countryside.

Barbara Probst used to tell Edie and Hank that it must be the bumpy ride down the unpaved Riddle Road that set customers’ bowels in motion. We considered that a possible answer. We also thought maybe it was simply the time of day, when the late-morning coffee from brunch at Lakeside General Store had taken effect. But they were only open on weekends, so that wouldn’t explain the blowing up of the Chalet during business hours on Wednesdays or Thursdays. It took some research but we finally discovered a theory that explained the source of our woes: The Mariko Aoki phenomenon.

For those of you unfamiliar, the Mariko Aoki phenomenon is the Japanese expression used to refer to what is, apparently, a common but—for obvious reasons—seldom-discussed problem, “the sudden urge some people feel to empty their bowels when in a bookstore.” We know that if this is the first you’re hearing of this reference, you’re already skeptical. We assure you. It is a real thing. In 1985 a woman named Mariko Aoki wrote a letter published in a Japanese literary magazine describing the effect that bookstores had on her bowels. The magazine was inundated with responses from readers claiming to have had the same experience, and felt obliged to publish a fourteen-page article on the phenomenon in its next issue. And so, a twenty-nine-year-old woman from Tokyo became the name of the condition that plagues many of our customers and causes such considerable grief for weary bathroom attendants.

The science is still out on the reason behind the phenomenon. Is it the smell of the paper and ink that triggers the intestines? Or is it possibly some Pavlovian response to being surrounded by books for those who routinely read on the toilet? Whatever the explanation, one thing is for sure, and that is that Barbara Probst, a woman who had such a sense of humor as to open a bookstore in a barn amidst a forest and name its bathroom the Chalet de Nécessité, would get a kick out of the whole idea. She might have a good laugh about our outhouse ordeals too.

On an overcast afternoon in late July of this year, I was sitting in the house when Sydney texted me while working in the store. “I think some hipster kid just tried to use the Chalet!” My reaction, fueled by both fear and rage, was swift. In less than thirty seconds I darted outside and was standing in front of the Chalet. The door was wide open and I could see the young bearded gentleman on the floor with a roll of paper towels attempting to mop up the floor.

Just the day before, our thousand-dollar compostable toilet had started giving us problems again. What we thought was just more of the same misuse by customers who could not follow the clearly written signs, I discovered was actually a leak at the drain pipe at the back of the pot. A trickle of urine had turned to a puddle and spread to the entryway of the Chalet. We needed a day to once again clean up the mess, and fix the pipe. As the designated sign-maker, Sydney had drawn up a sign to post on the door:

So there I stood looking down at the young twenty-something, while his girlfriend stood behind me holding a tote bag full of books she had just purchased. Both of us seemed to feel bad for the poor guy. He wouldn’t look me in the eye when I asked him, “So you read the sign, right?” He nodded without looking up. “But you used the toilet anyway?” He softly grunted a half-swallowed “uh huh.” I responded with an incredulous shake of my head, stood for a moment, let out a long sigh, and walked away.

The interaction had been so embarrassing the young man hurried with his girlfriend to their car and left a stack of sci-fi paperbacks on the check-out table back in the store. I might’ve felt bad for a minute but then I thought, whatever trauma the guy had suffered, I was the one left to clean up the rest of his pee. After this incident, we gave up on the compostable toilet.

We’ve since acquired a new toilet for the Chalet. It cost two hundred dollars. This one has a more efficient design. The instructions are easy to follow. There’s only one hole for all bodily waste. There’s a button to push to flush all said waste into said hole. It’s simple. This doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Men can now stand up and pee. That, as many women know, causes its own issues in regards to cleaning, but eliminates confusion. The top half of the new potty needs to be filled with water every few days for flushing, while the bottom half needs to be emptied at least once a week. As I did even with the previous fancier toilet, I will have to drag it out to the covered hole towards the edge of the woods behind the store to dump it and hose it out, just like my predecessors did with their bucket. This will be a regular chore, for six months out of the year, for the rest of my foreseeable life. And it will be necessary for me to be at peace with that reality.

In light of all of this potty talk, I’d like to leave you with one last thought ahead of 2024, a year fixing to be as bumpy as our own Riddle Road.

There are certain inevitable forces that come from both without and within us. We must remind ourselves that we feel the same pressures. We all feel them in our guts wherever we are at any given moment. Sometimes we are Mariko Aoki, suddenly struck while browsing the aisles, other times we are the book barn owners carrying buckets of shit to the edge of eternity. Whoever we might be, we must do our business. The responsibility we have to each other is to remember, as humans, we share so many things, one of them being a bathroom.

We here at Owl Pen Books wish you the happiest new year and we look forward to seeing and hearing from you all in 2024.