This post isn’t about the dragonfly pictured here; it’s about the joys (and challenges) of trying to take a shit in the jungles of Siberut Island. One would have to be extremely self-conscious to take a selfie while voiding one’s bowels in the jungle; hence the photo of this dragonfly, which I spotted while looking for a place to enact my post-Sumatran-coffee morning ritual.
In my previous post I wrote about the existential benefits of being bored in the jungles of Siberut Island. Endeavoring to take a shit in those selfsame jungles was – while not equal to task of savoring boredom – very much in the same experiential category. Which is to say that you can spend years at a time using industrial-world toilets without having to consider the simple human essence of taking a shit.
One of the most memorable lines in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums is when Japhy Ryder says: “All these people, they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it’s all washed away to conveniently-supervised sewers, and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes that their origin in shit and civet and scum of the sea.”
As someone who took countless open-air Colorado mountain shits in my teens and early twenties, I always liked that Dharma Bums passage – and, during my time on Siberut Island, I came to better appreciate this joyously bearlike activity.
Unlike in, say, a guesthouse on the Sumatran mainland, you can’t just stumble to the commode in the next room to take a shit when you’re in the Siberut jungle – you have to put on your clothes and boots and slog through calf-deep mud to find a suitable location.
This attunes you to those little tropical details you previously overlooked – the moss and the ants and the leaf-muted sunlight – and once you have discharged your task and buried it under leaves (probably to be eaten later by pigs or other jungle creatures) you feel this strange sense of accomplishment. You also feel fully and vividly and (in moments of self-consciousness) somewhat embarrassingly attuned to your surroundings.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. For more full-formed writing, check out my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, or the Essays or Stories archives on this site. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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