Buckland Valley Easter – The Meaning of Bush-Camping Shower

What a palaver camping is: that’s half its point. Fortunately our friends the Porters and the Hanbys have been here since Tuesday, so there’s a fire, a covered kitchen area and even a toilet, a wooden toilet and seat above a pit shielded with a canvas sheet, into which you pour a can of dirt when you’re finished. And if you’re a boy, as the girls discovered this morning, you forget to put down the lid and – like a version of the boy in Sixth Sense – “there’s flies everywhere.” As compensation for the basic level of amenities you get a superb view across the stream and the valley. It’s like being a nature king on a throne. Or, failing that, it’s like having a dump in the woods.

We were due to have gone to the Murray, to the Barmah State Forest, but blue-green algae saw to that. As far as I can recall that’s the first clear, direct impact climate change has had on me. Yes, there are water restrictions in Melbourne, but there’s been drought before and in truth its impact is pretty limited anyway. I’m not a big gardener, and even before water retrictions keeping the lawn going always seemed a bit mad, and more effort that we could usually muster.

(It’s hard to pour the water into the hole at the top of the bag. Nick’s found a drink bottle the neck of which fits perfectly, and cutting off the bottom makes a neat funnel. Apparently it never occurred to the manufacturers of the bush-shower that getting water into the thing efficiently was an important consideration.)

Anyway, everything was pretty much set up in advance. We have a shower site, across the stream, and the shower itself is a simple bag which lies in the sun all day until the afternoon when the water’s warm enough to be useable.

Now, instead of a shower being a part of one’s daily routine, an efficient way of getting clean and ready for the day ahead, warm water is a scarce luxury that has to be planned hours in advance, taken frugally and savoured: we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s not there. (This is true of the Murray also, and of water generally.) So the situation alters its meaning.

It’s worth noting, then, that despite the complexity of arranging a simple shower and performing any other simple function, like cooking or crapping, time goes by so slowly that you savour every moment. Things we take for granted (like power for one’s laptop: don’t get me started about getting it started) become challenges that take time and engenuity to resolve – and are all the more pleasurable for that.