The Big Necessity (3 page)

Our disgust with shit seems deep and sure, as potent as the swear words that get their power from it. There are good biological reasons for this. Feces are unpleasant. Outside the sexual fetish world of coprophagy, no one wants to smell, feel, or touch them (including me). But the power of our taboo words is modern. Church words used to hurt much more. The diminished power of “damn” explains why the climax of
Gone With the Wind
is always a bit of a puzzle. When church
influence weakened, the products of the body—which Puritan influence has successfully turned into a foul, shameful thing—stepped in instead to give us our worst words. There must be something wrong with it, after all, when all we do is get rid of it as fast as possible.

Meanwhile, a plentiful supply of euphemisms can serve as linguistic stand-ins. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker lists a dozen categories of euphemism, including taboo (shit), medical (stool, bowel movement) and formal (feces, excrement, excreta, defecation, ordure). The category that's missing is “conversational.” There is no neutral word for what humans produce at least once a day, usually unfailingly. There is no defecatory equivalent of the inoffensive, neutral “sex.”

I wish that “shit” didn't shock. It is a word with noble roots, coming from a family of words that also contains the Greek
skihzein
, the Latin
scindere
, or the Old English
scitan
, all meaning, sooner or later, to divide or separate. (Science is the art of distinguishing things by knowledge.) I use it, sometimes, because of a frustration with all those euphemisms. Feces is the Latin word for dregs and only took on its modern meaning in the seventeenth century. Any proponent of ecological sanitation—the reuse, via composting or some other means, of human excrement—will object to a potentially powerful and inexhaustible fertilizer being thought “the most worthless parts.” They also object to “waste” because it derives from the Latin for “uncultivated,” and because it shouldn't be wasted.

But mostly I use the word because throughout my travels the people who deal with things best are the ones who are not afraid of it. In the words of Umesh Panday, a Nepali sanitation activist, “Just as HIV/AIDS cannot be discussed without talking frankly about sex, so the problem of sanitation cannot be discussed without talking frankly about shit.”

 

One evening in Bangkok, I attend a party. It's the end of a long day, and the Toilet Party is supposed to calm spirits and foster connections, because it is being held as part of the World Toilet Organization's 2006 Expo. The Thais treat the conference with respect, perhaps because of
their beloved king's interest in wastewater aerators; a couple of hundred Thai delegates have been summoned from various government departments, from all over the country.

On the stage, traditional Thai dancers, with tapering fingers and extreme beauty, manage to glide with a serenity undiminished by the toilets that serve as a backdrop. As the entertainment proceeds, the attendees mingle over buffet food. A Japanese man who speaks no English, but who proffers a business card declaring himself a “household paper historian,” tries to converse with a world authority on public toilets who speaks no Japanese. The man in charge of Bangkok's sewage disposal has an earnest discussion with a Sri Lankan who has spent two years building low-cost latrines for tsunami victims. A man with a moustache introduces himself as a TV star in Malaysia. He's a TV cop. “Actually, the Malaysian equivalent of Starsky, as in Hutch.” Here, over canapés, is everything that intrigues me about this hidden human activity. Dedicated people, derided but determined, toasting their unheralded efforts to solve the world's biggest unsolved public health crisis, because who else, outside this world, will do it for them?

By the time of the party, I have had a professional curiosity in human excreta disposal for several months. I've noticed something strange happening. I read a piece about the Austrian director Michael Haneke in the
New York Times
and he suddenly says, out of nowhere, “We have a saying in Austria: we are already up to our necks in sewage. Let's not make waves.” I turn on the TV with no program in mind and find a documentary about W. H. Auden, and the first talking head is saying how Auden's guests were only allowed one sheet of toilet paper because any more was wasteful (I liked Auden already; I like him more now that I know this). On a train traveling through France one day, I become immersed in a book for hours. The first time I look out of the window, I see a sewage treatment plant in the middle of a green field. Psychologists call this a perception filter. Once you notice something, you notice it everywhere. Our most basic bodily function, and how we choose to deal with it, leaves its signs everywhere entwined with everything, as intricately intimate with human life as sewers are with the city. Under our feet, at the edge of sight, but there.

Once I start noticing, I can't stop. And once I start meeting the people who work in this world—who flush its sewers and build its pit latrines, who invent and engineer around our essential essence, in silence and disregard—I don't want to. I'd rather follow Sigmund Freud, who wrote that humanity's “wiser course would undoubtedly have been to admit [shit's] existence and dignify it as much as nature will allow.” So here goes.

 

 

_________________

East 21st Street, between Broadway and Park Avenue
(New York City Department of Environmental Protection)

 

 

THE ART OF DRAINAGE

______________

 

 

Beside a manhole in an East London street, a man named Happy hands over the things that will protect me in the hours to come: white paper overalls, with hood. Crotch-high waders with tungsten-studded soles that will grip but won't spark. A hard hat with a miner's light. Heavy rubber gloves, oversized. A “turtle”—a curved metal box containing an emergency breathing apparatus—to strap around my waist, along with a backup battery. Finally, a safety harness that Happy helps me buckle with delicacy, as it loops through my legs near my groin. It's tight but comfortable, and has the side benefit for male wearers of making all men seem rather well endowed. The harness will be the only means of dragging me out from the sewer into which I am about to descend, where the hazards include bacteria and viruses such as hepatitis A, B, and C; rabies and typhoid; and leptospirosis (“sewer workers' disease”) that can be caught from rat urine, and in its severe form causes vomiting, jaundice, and death.

There are also the gases. Methane, obviously. Hydrogen sulphide, known as sewer gas, which forms when organic matter decomposes in sewage, smells like rotten eggs and kills by asphyxiation. And whatever fumes arise from whichever effluents London's commercial businesses choose to pour down their drains and toilets today, with proper warning
or not. The greatest danger is the flow, which can be increased suddenly and rapidly with rainfall, so a stream becomes a torrent, and one that can contain anything that has been put down it that day, from two-by-fours to pieces of four-by-fours. Sewer workers have always died on the job, and they still die, no matter how advanced the infrastructure. In March 2006, Minnesota sewer workers Joe Harlow and Dave Yasis drowned in the St. Paul sewer system when a rainstorm came on suddenly.

Water can be dangerous in other ways: sugar manufacturers, for example, send into the sewer the boiling water that they clean their vats with. Underground, it turns into steam and can react unhappily with other gases in the system. Sewers that are known to be particularly hazardous are ranked C-class and cannot be entered without special permits. Though the men accompanying me have worked in the sewers for decades, they cannot know every inch of a vast network nor what is likely to be discharged into it. Some sewers haven't been visited in fifteen years. It's best to be prepared. And indemnified: a paper-suited man thrusts a form at me as I struggle with my crotch-high waders (items of clothing that would make members of the online Yahoo! sewer-boots fetish group—which does exist—speechless with one emotion or another). He says, “Sign this,” and gives me no time to read it. “Don't worry,” he says, with no smile. “It just means if you collapse, I get all your money.” This humor helps in a hard job, and there will be more of it.

Half a dozen men stand around the manhole. They match well enough the London journalist Henry Mayhew's description of their predecessors in 1851: “Well-conducted men generally, and for the most part, fine stalwart good-looking specimens of the English laborer,” though the size of their paunches shows that they've moved on from the traditional sewerman's tipple of rum to beer. They all seem to have very white teeth.

My escorts include one consultant, one senior engineer, and several wastewater operatives. Their names are Dave and Keith and Rob and Happy, but in the language of those who work in the city's sewers, they're all flushers. The name is no longer used officially, because it describes the job in times past when men waded into the silt of a sewer and dislodged blockages with brooms and rakes, and opened inlets to
flush river water into the tunnels to nudge the flow down into the Thames. They're wastewater operatives now, but they do what the flushers did: they keep the flow flowing.

Their equipment is better than the heavy blue overcoats and wick lamps that flushers used a century ago, but the men are fewer. If you look at the sewer systems of great cities, you'll start to think there's something wrong with the math. New York's 6,000 miles of sewers are served by 300 flushers. Paris has 1,500 miles and 284
égoutiers
. The mightiest network of any metropolitan city is London's. It is so mighty, no one knows how big it is. Thames Water, the private water utility that serves London, has 37,000 miles of sewers in its whole catchment, but that extends 80 miles from central London to Swindon. As for the length of the sewers under the metropolis, there was no precise answer to be had, beyond “a lot.” The number of flushers is a less slippery figure. At the time of my visit, it was 39. Thames Water claims more efficient equipment has reduced manpower needs. The flushers see it differently, muttering about outside contractors doing the job that only they know how to do best, and about asset-stripping in the boardroom. There were personnel cuts after the UK's water companies were privatized in 1989, and Thames Water is now on its third owner in nineteen years. Debates rage still about the wisdom of privatizing companies responsible for providing, in many eyes, an essential public good that costs money to clean and supply.

All the flushers know is that they're heading toward retirement, that the sewer knowledge they carry in their heads is irreplaceable (and unwritten), and that they could use some more staff, though only men like themselves. Sewers have always been a man's world. In London, they're a white, working-class man's world. There are few jobs left that are as monochrome and monosexual. There are female engineers who do sewer surveys, sometimes. But no one can remember a woman applying to be a flusher. Even black London cab drivers—who share the banter, skin color, and accents of the flushers—have reluctantly welcomed some women. But flushers are not cab drivers, and they've chosen, over the mapped roads above, these mostly unmapped and significantly more dangerous conduits, thoroughfares, and bypasses below.

The boundaries of this world are trunk sewers and brick, but they're
also the exclusivity of a marginalized occupation. In a scene from
Boys from the Brown Stuff
, a BBC documentary on flusher life, a new flusher tries to chat up a young woman outside a nightclub. He makes the mistake of telling her what his job is. The scene looks set up but her disgust is genuine. “Does it involve feces and such? I'm glad I didn't get you to buy me a drink, then.”

 

It's 10
P.M
. now. Night is a good time to enter sewers, when businesses—which contribute the biggest volume of waste—have closed. Night is when dangerous sewers are as safe as they can be. This first sewer is safer still, because the flow has been diverted to allow us access. It would be only a meter or so high normally because the Fleet sewer, formed when the filthy River Fleet was enclosed with brick, isn't one of the bigger ones. Some tunnels are several meters in diameter and wide enough to drive a Mini Cooper through. Some are barrel-shaped, some shaped like Wild West wagon canopies. The Fleet is a brick egg. (Elliptical shapes are strong and encourage the flow of water.)