Crazy Writer goes to Canada. part 3.

Toilet humor - or more precisely pit toilet humor.

As a frequent traveler of the US highway systems, I’m used to rest stop areas featuring these sturdy looking bathrooms.

A lot of the rest stops along the ALCAN feature bathrooms that are more like the old fashioned outhouses or pit toilets.

You’ll notice the buildings are wood and the doors just a thin slab with a little hook & eye type lock. Most of them also set right at the edge of heavily wooded areas.

Most of our stops far from towns featured the pit toilet and one of these types of trash cans. I could not resist pointing out to J, who had to make ‘pit stops’ (pun intended) more frequently than I, that the trash in these areas are better protected than her inside one of these little restrooms. Plus the trash cans smelled better than the bathrooms.

One night we were driving well past dark because we’d mis-judged how long it would take us to get to the next town with a motel. We had seen 3 bears near the road that day.  One just 20 minutes before she said she just had to stop. There were no lights at all in the area so all we could see was what was directly ahead of us in the headlights.

J pulled up as close to the pit toilet as she possibly could and left the headlights on so she could hopefully see a little bit once she got inside (it’s difficult to hold a flashlight and undo clothing at the same time). She added yet another new duty to the growing list of riding shotgun responsibilities. I was to keep one hand on the horn while continuously scouring the surrounding area for any sign of a bear. Her theory was that if I honked the horn to alert her to the presence of a bear she could make a mad dash back to the car.

Because I’m a very supportive friend and don’t like to dwell on the negative, I refrained from pointing out that the bears we saw that day were all black and would have to be very close to the car in order for me to see them in the very dark area outside of the headlights.

I wrote a little poem about the next series of events which in hind sight I found extremely funny. J did not see the humor at all when I read it to her the next day and somehow the page got ripped out of my notebook and tossed out the car window.

Alas I’ll never be able to match the cleverness of my original rhyme written while the incident was so fresh in my mind (plus the whole threat of murder) but I will tell you that it involved the rustling of dried leaves, the screech of an owl, a nervous hand jerking unintentionally against a car horn, and a frightened woman stumbling out of her own jeans during a desperate dash toward the safety of the car.

A car, I might add, that became decidedly unsafe for the other woman with the nervous hand.