An Ode to Portable Waste

By the time you read this, I will have been camping for nearly a month and will have learned many things from both living in nature and within 2 feet of my family members at all times. By then, perhaps the most significant change, though, will have been my new-found appreciation for an adequate waste disposal system.

In other words, I’ve come to a point in my life, God help me, where the purchase of a portable waste tank results in rejoicing and squealing that was once reserved for an impending date with a cute boy.

From cute boys to movable poop, oh, how the years have changed me.

Should you not yet be at the stage in your life where you marvel at the miracle of mobile sewage, allow me to enlighten you. This is a portable waste tank:

It's like a covered wagon for your pee and dishwater.

You (or rather, my husband) hook up the portable waste tank to an RV and empty either your black or grey water tank into the portable tank. You wheel the portable tank to a nearby dumping station, and then you empty previously collected black or grey water into the designated hole in the ground.

What’s the point?

Without a portable waste tank, you have to empty the RV’s waste tanks directly into the hole in the ground at the dumping station when they get full or as you’re leaving the campground. No problem. Except that my family lives in a teeny, tiny RV with teeny, tiny waste tanks. Specifically, we have a teeny, tiny grey water tank – the tank that holds dishwater and anything else that runs down the drains in our sinks and shower. In other words, we can all pee for days in the RV, but one long shower causes dirty, nasty, oh-that’s-why-they-call-it-grey-water water to back up into our tub.

This is very gross.

This is also very inconvenient.

Am I confusing all of you house-dwellers? Are you suddenly really grateful for indoor plumbing? You should be.

The bottom line is that we found out on our second day of camping that we couldn’t use our shower unless we were parked at a campsite that had constant access to a sewer hookup. We found out during our second week that the majority of places that I’d reserved did not have sewer hookup because sites without sewer hookup are cheaper.

In other words, I was facing about a year of having to shower in campground “bathhouses.”

Now, I had already willingly given up pooping in my own bathroom for a year. We agreed, as a family, that there would be no pooping in the RV so that none of us would have to endure the other’s stench. It’s a small space. But the prospect of never showering in my own home? It was depressing. And, then, one night Emma and I found ourselves showering with several very large, very friendly beetle-like bugs.

We plunked down $200 for the largest portable waste tank Camping World sold the very next day.

And, lo, there was rejoicing. There was showering, celebratory high-fives and phone calls to friends.

Last weekend, I called my dad to wish him a Happy Father’s Day. During the course of the conversation, I shared with him our collective joy over our portable waste tank and the ability to shower whenever we wanted. He chuckled, and I suspect that he recalled images of a teenage girl who refused to leave the house without ample quantities of mascara and mousse.

“Did you ever think you’d be so excited over a portable waste tank?” he asked.

No.  No, I did not.

But I also thought my boobs were going to stay where they started.