Heading to Sh*t Hill with My Trowel
And other highlights of my hippie childhood…and what it all taught me
When I was five, my parents sold everything they owned and bought a piece of property in northern California.
Just raw land — we first lived in an old army surplus tent (with my baby brother in a crib at one end of it) while they built a shed; then we spent the winter in the shed while Dad and a friend worked on the one-room A-frame house you see in the photo above.
The house had a loft where we all slept. And windows, which were a great improvement over the shed, as was the insulation. I don’t remember a lot about the winter in the shed, except that it was cold. And the floor wasn’t quite level.
The house also had cold running water (eventually, when Dad ran black PVC pipe down the hill from a spring), and a wood heat stove, and a wood cook stove. It had a big braided rug in the center of the room, and a cold-cabinet on the north wall for perishable food. At mealtimes we sat on the floor around a low octagonal table — only about a foot and a half high— that Dad made, which folded up when not in use.
The house did not have: Electricity. A phone. Hot running water. Or a bathroom.
The basic arrangement was: you could pee anywhere you wanted to — outside of course (and don’t be a jerk and do it on the path, people walk barefoot here, come on); for more serious business, you went to “Shit Hill,” a low, heavily wooded rise just beyond the edge of the front meadow. When you needed to go, you took some toilet paper and a little trowel, and tried to find a place where no one had dug before.
This got harder as time went on.
The first time my Grandma Cleta came to visit, she was horrified by this, as you might imagine. “It just breaks my heart, seeing that sweet little girl heading into the woods with her trowel!” Grandma Cleta was a highly civilized lady, with coordinated pastel polyester pantsuits and perfectly permed hair and a dusty-floral-smelling perfume and makeup that would rub off on your face when she gave you one of those side-swiping kisses, so of course our rough and rustic lifestyle freaked her out.
