.. Is This One Reason Men are More Rural than Women?
(c) 2016, Davd
I’d already been in a Big City too long, four months before i escaped to a village. Walking Fritz two or three times each day, showed me an indicator,
Walking Fritz down the streets and alleys, i often noticed that i had to hurry back indoors—to piss. I was feeling OK otherwise, Fritz wanted to keep walking, but because we were in a city i had to cut our walk short .. to urinate in a toilet. Hell, i might even get arrested if i didn’t go hide, to piss.
Back at Camp 1511, or on Vancouver Island: I just picked a tree to fertilize, and unzipped my pants. Occasionally i might have to walk a minute or less to be out of sight of others. We could walk for hours, as far as bladder capacity was concerned—because we could empty those bladders and do good by emptying them, and then walk on.
I gained from pissing away what my kidneys had filtered out as waste; and the tree also gained because that same waste, down by its roots, became fertilizer.
Ecologically, the tree and i “closed the nutrient cycle.” If it was an apple tree, that tree might combine some of those chemicals which had become waste for me to piss away, with sugars made in its leaves, and produce fruit for me and my friends to eat. Months later, pissing under the same tree, i might return a few molecules of those nutrients back to the tree a second time.
That’s how ecology ought to work.
In cities, it doesn’t: Pissing under trees is to put it mildly, bad manners. What’s more, there are so many people and so few trees in a square kilometre of city, that the trees could possibly “become overloaded.” So it is my duty, not only by way of being Nice, but also because cities are crowded, to hold my bladder until i can hurry inside to use a toilet—even if poor Fritz gets a shorter walk than he ought.
My personal attitude, my urinary measure of overcrowding, is that my kind of place is where i can piss while walking the dog. That’s not all there is to overcrowding, not nearly; the urinary measure of “my kind of place” is an incomplete, “negative” measure. But it’s true as far as it reaches.
Two further comments might be worth reading. First, as a matter of species diversity: My kind of place is a good place for dogs… and that seems generally true. Quite apart from being able to take longer walks without looking for a toilet to hide in, being in a dog friendly place is healthier for a man.
Second—and obvious when you think about it—is that women don’t find the freedom to piss outdoors as valuable as we men do. It’s more bother for them, to put it politely. In summer they run more risk of blackfly and mosquito bites; in winter, more risk of frostbite. And when the evening is over, it’s naturally a men’s job to piss out the campfire.
