No, those are not mounds of shit. That dingy wooden structure is a shower, and those two piles are the water heater. A tank is buried beneath the mounds. As the sun beats down on them throughout the day, the microbes inside get to work breaking down old plant matter and the compost piles heat up. The water in the buried tank can reach a hundred degrees!
This picture doesn’t really do the piles justice. Crimson black seaweed is mixed up with wood chips and saw dust to create a natural water heater. A spigot inside the shower shack spits out bathwater for bathers to enjoy and wash themselves with in the open air. To emulate the shower experience, a watering can that can be hooked onto a pulley can be hoisted and tipped above a bather’s head.
The whole experience was more than comfortable. The warm water, the cool breeze between my naked thighs, the open sky above! Three pails of water was all I needed to do the job. I can’t imagine it is very pleasant once the weather cools, but it was so refreshing to have an after-dinner wash in the evening air after an afternoon of hiking around the Maine wilderness. This wonderful setup was provided to me and my girlfriend by the Deer Isle Hostel. We thought we were just getting a room in some artsy cabin–we had no clue that we had signed on to join a low-tech commune powered by solar panels and compost.
The shower was just one of the nifty technologies that this lovely compound employs to avoid modern waste. The outhouses were composters too! But I’ll show those off at a later time. For now, I just wish I could bathe myself outside again. Maybe I’ll get a bucket and some rope and have some fun on my back porch…