turds

Several million are produced each day: billions across the planet. Turds.

Human shit comes in steaming piles and pellets like rabbit droppings. But mostly it comes in discrete portions known as turds. If a turd doesn’t achieve a certain consistency, its existence as a turd is unlikely: a cowpat-like pile of shit is not a turd. However, they can be small and loosely packed, especially underwater. Such turds are known as squits.

My friend Rock and I have reported the vagaries of our bowel activities to each other over 40 years. We focus on urgency, not dimension. He refers to shitting as taking a dump, though years ago his favourite term was borry. It appears in no dictionary. I suspect a borry is interchangeable for either a shit or a turd.

Excited cries echo through the dark from under the cliffs near Du Cane Hut. “Check this, will ya?” It’s February, early 1970s. Three lads are walking Tasmania’s Overland Track—it had no name then—from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair. One has unloaded a huge turd. All three gather and illuminate it with torches. They estimate it at over a foot long.

Turds fascinate young men. And they fascinate me. Turds are rarely examined, which is a shame: our own deserve examination as indicators of our health. Curiously, the forensic examination of animal scat has been the generator of auguries for millennia: a complete waste of time.

Scatology, unfortunately, refers to bad language and not to the study of turds. Some turds, a dangerous breed, float, obviously unable to displace their own weight in water. Do they contain hidden air pockets? Are vegetarian turds more likely to be floaters? Who is doing the research?

After school one afternoon in 1977 I leave a small but incredibly persistent floater in the bowl of the staff toilet at Trafalgar High School. No amount of flushing can either break it up or coax it round the S-bend. I slink from the cubicle in shame.

The no-go syndrome is an anxiety I bear with me to every public toilet. The men’s toilet in the side passage of the Bendigo Library flushes reservoirs of ineffective water around the bowl. Three and sometimes four swirling deluges are required to achieve clearance.

This morning I deposit a corker—I’ve missed a day—in the bowl of the toilet in Room 209 at Rydges South Park Hotel in Adelaide. I flush. The bowl clears, but then, like a mouse peering round a corner, the turd sticks its nose out from the S-Bend. The cistern fills and I flush again. For ten seconds the bowl is clear and then an inch of the turd sneaks out from its hiding-place again.

Four times I press and hold the button and four times that turd disappears, waits ten seconds till the coast is likely to be clear, then peeks out again. The thing is so friendly I leave it to say hello to the maid later in the morning.   

     

Rock on.