But no.
It was envisioning those 2 AM nature calls, heretofore entailing a groggy shuffle through a darkened house to the little room with the glowing night light. My new powder room required a hike down a narrow path between spruce trees whose branches grew longer and more prickly in the dark, followed by a ribbon of road harlequined with shadows, and, finally, a twisty path overlaid with tree roots and moose tracks. No one but an idiot would do it.
Then it hit me. The obvious solution. And I don’t mean the historical artifacts currently in disguise as homes for nasturtiums or repositories for potpourri. Rather, credit Mr. Dannon. Or Ms Brown Cow or Herr Strauss. Finish off the yogurt, and you have a receptacle that is lightweight, easy to grasp, equipped with a snug-fitting lid to facilitate transportation in the AM, and readily replaceable in case of loss, breakage or theft. The twenty-four ounce capacity revealed itself as a practical choice.
One morning a few days after settling into the cabin, I descended the ladder from my sleeping loft and stepped out into the quiet of early dawn on Kachemak Bay. Under a coral-streaked sky, the only sounds were the soft twitter of a bald eagle from her nest overhead and the occasional calls of migrating birds, newly arrived from their southern wintering grounds.
In celebration of this yearly stopover, Homer’s popular Shorebird Festival was due to open that day. Bird-watchers would be almost as plentiful as birds. On my own private tract of alders and spruce, tall grasses and devil’s club, I could count on solitude.
Clad in my favorite nightgown and slippers, the one worn so soft its flower pattern had weathered into something resembling a blurred topographical map, the other kept in working order with epoxy and rawhide, I set out for my Alaska Powder Room, organic chamber pot in hand. Strolling along, I liked to look at the land, noting the overnight changes characteristic of an Alaskan spring, and simultaneously trying to imagine the terrain, wild and unruly, before human beings arrived.
As such facilities go, my powder room here in Alaska was a renegade response to the Niagra-flushing, chrome-and-mirrored settings I had known. Back in New York there was one done up in pink marble, whose rosey commode, when activated, chimed “God Save The Queen.” And another, in which a push-button whose function I could not fathom let loose a geyser of water like buckshot lofting me three feet in the air.
The powder rooms of Alaska vary greatly in design and decor, depending on the ingenuity and eccentricity of the builder. Some lack doors, exposing the visitor and nature to views of each other. Seats may be rimmed with Styrofoam or real fur to prevent rear-end freeze-ups in winter. All, like doctors’ offices, distinguish their owners by the type of reading material available.
My Alaska Powder Room was a structure of weathered wood equal in size to a generously proportioned broom closet, hunkered down midst a patch of spindly alders with its back to a range of hills recently capped with snow. Tacked inside that rear wall hung a full length shag rug of orange and yellow yarn, combination fuzzy backrest and insulation against winds bellowing down from the north.
An advantage of limited space was the ability, while seated, to prop open the door with a toe ... or forehead, if my toe wasn’t in the mood. Anyone walking along the dirt driveway would have been close enough to say hello without shouting, but at this hour not even an overzealous salesman would have dreamed of dropping by. Letting the sun now filtering through the alders’ upper branches burrow into the back of my neck, I lost myself in a written history of Alaska’s northern territories. By the time I exited the Powder Room airily balancing my now nearly weightless chamber pot on the palm of one hand, my imagination had transformed the springy duff of moss and spruce needles under my feet into tundra and tussock grass.
Head down, eyes fixed on negotiating the tree roots across the path while observing the dust rising and settling on the worn suede of my slippers, I rounded a thicket of elderberry bushes and stopped dead in my tracks.
There before me was a sight so alien to my wilderness state of mind that for several seconds it refused to register. In the center of the driveway, still as the morning, huddled a trio of three figures. Something about them suggested an Eddie Bauer catalogue: Sherlock Holmes hats of plaid wool, ponchos patterned in brown and olive camouflage, rubber boots festooned with weeds and dried mud. They stared straight at me through three sets of the biggest binoculars I had ever seen. A tripod and spotting scope completed the vision, along with the lettering above their visors: Dallas, Texas Bird Watchers’ Auxiliary.
I considered tiptoeing backwards like a movie in reverse, vanishing into the alders. Almost before the thought took shape, a trill of bird song issued from the undergrowth to the trio’s left. The three rotated as a unit, scanned the landscape in a tableau of slow motion, rummaged under pocket flaps for spiral note pads, scribbled furiously.
The sun slipped behind a cloud. Suddenly I felt cold. And conscious of my image in their eyes: a wandering, nightie-clad Ophelia, chamber pot held aloft in lieu of a torch. Dignity was the only option.
Calling on the ambiance of those east coast powder rooms, I swept forward, sliding my feet along the road’s surface so as not to leave my slippers behind in the dust.
“Good morning,” I hissed in the hushed volume prescribed by bird-watchers, wishing I had brushed my teeth or at least smoothed my wild-woman hair. The trio separated itself into two men and one woman.
“Good morning! Good morning!” In unison they whispered apologies for trespassing, extended right hands in greeting. I responded in kind, tucking my chamber pot under one arm. With barely restrained excitement, the woman recounted the number of birds they had added to their lists since daybreak, then gestured towards my container, eager to share in this unexpected collaboration of early morning expeditions.
“Collecting specimens?” she enthused.
“Oh,” I tossed off, waving my chamber pot vaguely about before easing it out of sight behind me to divert further curiosity. “Nothing that you don’t see every day.” q
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