When You’ve Really Got to Go

Spend any amount of time with me and you know I make frequent trips to the bathroom at home or restrooms in public. Since COVID, I’ve become more squeamish about portable toilets, but if that’s the only option, I’ll hold my nose and not look down. I can’t recall the last time I peed in the wild, but it would have been on a long hike years ago.

 

Sometimes the urge is real, like after drinking a large, iced tea while running errands. Other times, I’m convinced seeing a Women’s Room generates a Pavlovian response – I really don’t have to go now, but I can easily be convinced otherwise because relief is right there, right now.

 

I wrote during the early months of the pandemic about the quandary outdoor exercisers faced with so many public restrooms shuttered to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. But since the world’s reopened, something else has happened: Publicly accessible restrooms have continued to dwindle in numbers.

 

Here in San Diego, public restrooms were, and still are, a big public health issue. To discourage their use by people lacking their own facilities, the city took out toilets, only to replace them with Port-a-potties after a serious hepatitis A outbreak.  More recently, parents complained of rampant drug use and disorderly conduct in the public restrooms surrounding a Balboa Park playground. 

 

So if municipal facilities are out of service, people can go to a nearby store or shop, right? Not always. You might have no trouble walking into a Walmart or supermarket restroom, but urban and suburban small business owners frequently either claim they lack facilities (which seems like a labor law violation to me) or force you to purchase for usage. Even Starbucks, once known to every runner for its generous use of its restrooms, is changing its tune. And, as much as some of us won’t admit it, privately owned restrooms segregate -- not by gender but race and ethnicity and apparent homelessness. 

 

I’m old enough to remember when travelers had to pay to use a public toilet – a practice made illegal after lawyers proved it discriminated against women, who were more apt to need them. 

 

I recall from my first marathon, years before chip timing, what happens when supply and demand are grossly out of alignment. Having waited in long lines for the portable toilets, people started to realize they were not going to make it to the start when the gun went off. So everyone – my sister and I included – mass migrated to an upland wooded area next to the street. Only it was late October in Washington, D.C., there were no leaves on trees, nor bushes to hide behind. And it was raining, hard, oversaturating the soil. So the waste eventually drifted down the hill to where starters stood. I remember getting a whiff when we ran by it again around Mile 8. During my fourth marathon, I didn’t think anything of all of the men whipping it out to pee along a Staten Island street, not realizing I’d decided to wait for friends in what New York City Marathon organizers called “the world’s longest urinal.” Don’t believe me? Listen to this.

 

All of which is to say, it’s getting harder to find adequate places for a potty break. And we are talking basic body functions to address. If you don’t see a problem, you probably have some privilege others don’t. As I train for a 14-mile day hike*, the lack of facilities (but not crowds) is being incorporated into my training. I need to find the balance between hydration and urination, so I make it at least halfway to what I anticipate being a portable toilet. After all, if something’s gotta give, it’s bound to be my bladder.

 

*The actual trail is 12 miles, but I am leaving from my house; thus, the longer distance.

Photo: Water, water everywhere, but nowhere you can pee. Photo from a May San Diego Bay Historic Harbor cruise.