At some point in your life’s journey the day may arrive when you will be required to solve, perhaps with great urgency, the rather mucky dilemma of how best to make an unscheduled organic deposit (known in the trade as a “bush-poo”) while out roaming the wilds. Chances are you will be without the familiar assistance of conventional toilet paper. This will likely pose something of a unique crisis. A crisis for which you may have precious little time to contemplate your misfortune, but worry not – as always, Nature provides.
Harken dear reader, my advice may just save the day.
With the learned experience that comes of having lived much of my life in the wilds, I can advise in good faith that the soft, furry leaves of the ubiquitous local Wild Tobacco shrub make excellent bush toilet paper. Truth be told, there was a time in my twenties when I used Wild Tobacco-leaf ‘toilet paper’ exclusively for more than 2 years. That’s just the sort of thing most people do in their twenties right? In fact, I may have developed a mildly narcotic addiction to this peculiar toiletry habit. Even now, more than two decades later, I can’t go past a healthy young tobacco plant without feeling a twinge of sudden abdominal activity. I suppose I could try patches?
When this desperate circumstance does arise then my first word of advice is to stay calm and as a certain galactic travel guide famously inscribes on its cover: “DON’T PANIC!”. Panic will only lead to trouble, probably trouble of an unspeakable variety in fact, and soon. Rather, you should coolly assess thelandscape for the purpose of availing yourself of a large handful of furred leaves from the nearest Wild Tobacco plant. I say here to collect a “large handful”. With trial and error during my Mount Glorious days I quickly wised up to the limited tensile strength of these admirably soft leaves and as such, I strongly recommend you go with 4 or 5 ply to avoid mishap.
A quick but necessary word of warning here (from my lawyer). Take particular care in your haste to ensure that the large-leafed plant you are about to apply to your tender nether-regions is not, in fact, the Giant Stinging Tree. There are few field reliable tests for the novice which can reliably distinguish the Giant Stinging Tree from Wild Tobacco, other than that the former causes excruciating and enduring pain the instant it comes into contact with your skin, whereas the latter does not. Let that knowledge be a ready reckoner in the field.
I further advise where possible and if time permits, to seek out the absolutely newest, most tender of leaves on the Wild Tobacco and if you are fortunate enough to have your bowel move in the morning, there is much to be said for the dew-covered leaf. Much indeed…
A quick backstory here…At my peak wild tobacco-use time I was 21 years old and living a fabulously languid and bohemian lifestyle in a homemade teepee I’d set up amidst the lush rainforest of a place known as Mount Glorious (no really…that’s its actual name). The image which attends this blog is from that legendary time and clearly celebrates my lack of toilet facilities. Apparently the good people of Queensland thought it rather quaint and bizarre that a young dreadlocked hippy would not only have no toilet but would also volunteer to go off the dole (being on the dole in the 90s was a total hoot for us alternative types, not like today’s veritable Gulag).
It took me and a meticulous Swiss friend some 3 months of daily toil to clear a hectare or so of dense lantana to make room for my palatial teepee and another year before we completed planting out the fertile, volcanic soils with rainforest seedlings. My teepee, in breaking with thousands of years of Native American tradition (they never lived in Mount Glorious) was installed around a raised timber floor and heated by an internal combustion stove. It was cutting-edge feral living. I installed solar panels on a tall post in one of the only places the sun reliably found the ground and powered up such luxuries as lights, torch recharger and a charger for my primitive laptop.
Now I can well imagine some of you younger-reader-types gasping like anoxic guppies in astonishment that laptops were even invented back then…well they were. Barely. And although their puny computing muscle was probably on par with a modern TV remote my little lappie was the only solar-powered, fancy typewriter I knew of. Which was, I thought, awesomely cool and hip.
In a biological sense the teepee served a similar purpose to the earthen display mounds that male lyrebirds make at this time of the year to dance on. Like a frisky Lyrebird and single at the time, I too desired a mate. Although I’m generally too shy to dance (in public) and singing is definitely NOT my strongest competency, I suppose my dreadlocks were kinda like a magnificent tail and my early trumpet playing attempts might conceivably be compared to the legendary troubadour talents of a lyrebird?
Ok, that’s probably not accurate – my trumpeting sounded more like the tortured bleating of a fatally wounded, lactose intolerant goat (who has just gorged on cheese) and my dreadies were totally manky and gross. Notwithstanding the above, I did eventually succeed in luring a partner to my conical lair.
I mention this only by way of introducing you to the wonderful yurt that we subsequently built by the creek. Because we lived DEEP in the rainforest with no road access and barely a path at all really, every part of this yurt construction had to be carried down through the forest and assembled on site. This included the 6m-wide timber floor, cast-iron fireplace, Singer treadle sewing machine and queen-sized futon mattress (and wasn’t that the most STUPID bed to have in a place so perennially dank and dark. We pretty much slept on a fetid lump of mold spores).
So close to the creek were we in fact that when it flooded, which it did often in Mount Glorious, the swollen creek waters would actually pass BENEATH the raised floor of the yurt. I vividly recall lying in bed listening with some apprehension to the throaty roar of dark water rushing, not 3 feet below me and was occasionally jolted out of my uneasy slumber by the sudden thud of drifting branches pummeling the footings. And the frogs!! Never have I heard such a deafening cacophony of sexual ardor as on those wet, dark nights on the creek at Mount Glorious.
By way of wrapping this shamelessly me-centric story up, I will quickly recount a visit I made earlier this year back to the same creek where my teepee and yurt once reigned supreme. Where, in the summer of 1992 I had faced off against a veritable army of old-growth lantana, I now walked amongst huge, majestic rainforest trees. Incredibly, these towering giants were the very same seedlings that I lovingly planted all those years ago. In some cases, the timber stakes I had used had remained and were deeply embedded in half a meter of buttressed trunk. I felt a strong paternal love and affection for these beautiful trees – they were after all, planted not only by my young hand, but also on the organic fertility provided by my daily bowel movements and thousands of recycled Wild Tobacco wipes.