Where’s the flush?
We were down at the Columbia Gorge trailhead last year, emptying bladders and filling water bottles. A woman emerged from the restroom and whispered to her companion in a conspiratorial voice, “There’s no flush.” Her friend shook her head in incomprehension. “Not working?” she asked. “No, there’s nothing but a hole.” “A hole?” her friend asked incredulously. “Just a hole in the ground and no flush.”
I felt like a Cro Magnon listening in on aliens from some advanced galaxy. How could they possibly understand my dependence on a polluting gas engine? Or something as totally primitive as a cellphone? These two debutantes had missed their exit, apparently, on the way to the Ritz. A pit toilet was incomprehensible and if it weren’t such a sordid subject matter, it would have made for the nucleus of many a future discussion over bridge and tea at the Country Club. “But where, Charlotte? where does it Go???”
Indeed. Not that our two ladies could answer that question in regard to the plumbing matrix from their Beverly Hills manse to the sewer system it connects to. What matters is that it be whisked away, out of sight, out of smell. We don’t know how things work anymore — but so long as they do, we don’t need to care. The world is less and less natural to us; it’s electrons and silicon, computerized and digitized, all packaged in Black Boxes that create the new universe.
The trouble is, Charlotte, we’re still of the natural world. Body functions, pheromones, appetites, all that genetic coding of mammalian evolution in a world that’s more and more alien to us. We’ll fix that eventually. We’ll adapt to the virtual world, the one we make not so much in our own image as a clever cyber image. The natural stuff will be obsolete soon and we’ll replace the old ‘parts’ with new and improved engineered ones. The robots aren’t going to take over us humans. Us humans are going to become cyborgs.
And Charlotte, the best part is you won’t need a flush. Or a toilet either.
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