The privatization of relief - #135

$7 for a little shade.

There is no shade in the Dakotas. It was 108 F as we drove from Casper, Wyoming to Bismarck, North Dakota in an inescapable heat dome. Our AC had broken the day before, leaving us with an 8-hour drive in the broiling heat with an infant. I was in the backseat pouring La Croix onto napkins to wipe the baby down, checking his temperature every 30 minutes with the digital reader. The baby was fine; the checks were for me. We’d planned to pull over regularly to accommodate breastfeeding, but we couldn’t find anywhere to stop with shade. Every time we’d spot a tree in the distance, we’d arrive to find the tree was behind a fence. The shade had been privatized. 

As our Subaru rolled merrily along through the middle of nowhere, completely unfazed by its own failures, we used our limited reception to find a refuge. I was stripped down to my bra, using our road atlas to fan the baby. His own motorized fan had already died. Jibs lay sprawled across our suitcases in the very back, panting, eyes gently shut. We only had to make it another 28 minutes to get to a gas station right outside the Cheyenne River Reservation in a town called (of all things) Faith. 

Faith, South Dakota’s #1 hang.

Ben pulled into the station, and I threw on a shirt to trot inside. A big man with a big beard and a big hat sat behind the counter, looking up under the brim at a distressed woman in gym shorts, sandals, and a large button down with only one hooked button offering any semblance of decency. 

“Hi, would it be alright if I brought my dog inside? Our AC broke yesterday and we’re driving through to Minnesota.” 

He nodded, and I dashed out, returning with a dog, a bowl, a baby, a diaper bag, and the last bits of my sanity. The gas station’s AC churned furiously, doing its best to keep the inside at a strained 80 degrees, a haven in the ever sprawling corn. I set up shop at the small table in the corner with two mismatched chairs. In a whirl, I poured water into the bowl, looped Jibs’s leash around my ankle, unbuttoned the lone button, and got the baby to the milk — their matching gulps synced to my racing heart. 

Ben came in shortly, grabbing a local newspaper on the way in. The letter to the editor that week was from a couple just like us: passing through, on the road, in search of respite. They wrote to thank the gas station. 

We spent the better part of that road trip looking for shade. We watched the sun angle as we pulled into small towns, turning down side streets to catch the shade of an old tree or an older building. I poured over satellite images in Google Maps looking for parks that were more than barren strips of bleached grass. We found a city block in Craig, Colorado with a handful of old growth trees where we changed the baby in the grass; somewhere along the Colorado River we found a park with one tree, the canopy providing just enough shade for the car as we let Jibs splash in the marshy water; we lounged on a blanket next to the Red River in Fargo, North Dakota eating Potbelly sandwiches; but mostly we stopped in the corporate shade of big oil and big coffee. Starbucks became our most reliable bastion of relief as the parks became less shaded and less common, and the trees sat cordoned off on private property. Shade was now a seven dollar iced chai every hundred miles.

Reprieve from the blaring sun isn’t the only relief that’s becoming increasingly hard to come by: rest stops were either nonexistent or non operational, well-maintained water spigots and fountains are rarities in the age of bottled water, and shelter comes at the cost of the establishment as cities turn toward hostile architecture and anti-loitering laws in attempts to push the homeless elsewhere. 

Cities are, at the very least, thinking about shade. Many American cities now tout robust tree-planting plans, but trees grow slowly and the days are getting hotter. Awnings offer quicker shade, but they can also be expensive to install and they wear out over a decade of blaring sun — and expense is a problem when those with the means to create shade often aren’t the ones seeking it. The only time we even saw people outside the whole trip, until we reached the cool breeze of Lake Superior, was in lower income areas where residents walked and rode bikes. Everyone else was tucked inside, whether at work, in their home, or in their cars (presumably with working AC.) 

As we traveled along major interstates, passing through Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and back, our biggest problem wasn’t the sun, it was the lack of infrastructure. I have this sort of righteous indignation about these problems. These are interstates! Tourist routes! And this is a car centric nation. We may not be as road trip focused as we once were, but why is there so little relief anywhere? And whose responsibility was it to create that relief?

---

At a late summer town staff meeting, a portapotty was listed on the agenda because no one was using it. It sat at the corner of the basketball court, next to the playground with the old bikes and scattered balls, just outside the town hall. And why would people use it? Home was only ever a few blocks away at most for this town of some 200 mountain-dwellers. But a portapotty costs money, so if no one is using it, why keep it?

Meanwhile, toilet paper started appearing along the backcountry pass road that cuts through our town. The pass leads from one small mountain town to another, but it’s a beloved drive by overlanders. A few thousand tourists drive it every year. The route is part of a circuit in this region and we’re the only destination without anything to offer. The pass connects our bedroom community to a four-wheeling hotspot on the other side of the ridge. The problem is, between that four-wheeling hotspot and the market where we buy our groceries, there isn’t a single restroom for two to three hours. When nature calls, nature is all that’s available. If you’re equipped with WAG bags, or even the backcountry basics of a trowel for digging and a doggy bag for toilet paper, you can hike off trail far enough for discretion to get things done. The problem is, most people don’t. On our local dog walk, we’ve found human shit and toilet paper right off the trail minutes from our house. On Labor Day, we found a mound of human feces with its accompanying toilet paper right on the road — not buried, not covered, not dealt with in any fashion at all. Just left in the road. 

So the question was: If the portapotty could be positioned so that it was visible from the road, would those passing through use it? And if it was only used by those passing through, did it serve the community? More importantly, did it need to? 

Our town is surrounded by National Forest, and while we don’t own this wilderness, it is quite literally our backyard, frontyard, and side yard. There are signs along our three mile valley warning of everything from avalanches to wildlife to the very real lack of services. Once you’re out there, you’re on your own, and you’re expected to know how to do that. As much as I’d like to think everyone’s been briefed on wilderness etiquette, how could they be? There are reasons these tourists have opted to drive the pass instead of hike it, and at least one of them is the desire for comfort over shoveling out their own bathroom. 

We can get mad at the lack of manners, we can get mad at the lack of public wilderness education, we can get mad at the sheer lack of respect for the place we call home, but we can't get mad at them for needing to use the bathroom. So is it our job to provide that comfort? That basic access to relief? If we want them to stop shitting wherever they want, it might be.

There’s been a lot of cultural discussion around the degradation of manners since the onset of the pandemic. But people have always been people, and the more of them there are, the more selfish people there will be blasting music in the woods, littering, and scattering soiled toilet paper. It’s a numbers game at this point. 

There is a world where our town could have a public restroom, but it would require us working with the Forest Service. There are many trails here with old Forest Service markers, but they’re no longer maintained because if we ask the Forest Service to maintain them, it opens up the discussion for the Forest Service to ask for something in return: namely, a parking lot. So locals maintain the trails themselves. No one likes that thousands of people drive through here, most of them ignoring the speed limit, kicking up dust, and washboarding our commute. The last thing any of us want is them deciding to spend their day here too.

But that’s the attitude that puts trees behind fences. “This is mine and I don’t want you ruining it.” 

---

My parents spent a good part of their 20s working in the backcountry of Idaho, my dad as a smokejumper and my mom as a wildlife biologist tracking mountain lions. In the 70s, they knew all the best watering holes and hot springs. But as those spots became more popular, they also became overrun with trash. Now, they’re all privately owned. You need to schedule your time slot to visit. At my mom’s favorite old haunt, alcohol is now banned. People did in fact ruin it. 

We joke a lot about making the pass a toll road, about rolling boulders onto the road, about Wile E. Coyote efforts to divert, slow, or dissuade the thousands of people who drive through here without waving. But when we were driving through somewhere else, all we wanted was a little help. 

So what comes first? Good people or good services? Relief or manners? What efforts or anti-efforts have you noticed in your community when it comes to the big three of bathrooms, water, and shelter? And in what ways could we help each other when infrastructure doesn’t exist?

I’d love to hear what’s happening in your community, the good and the bad, in regards to how we take care of each other.

---

Obviously I’ve been thinking a lot about the public access to and the privatization of relief. Here’s a list of some reading and listening driving that thinking. 

• The Decline of America’s Public Pools by Eve Andrews in The Atlantic

• Shade Will Make or Break American Cities by Emma Marris in The Atlantic

• Entangled: Laid end to end, the world’s fences would reach the sun. What are they doing to wildlife? by Ben Goldfarb for bioGraphic

• Solar panels in parking lots make so much sense. Why don’t we do this in the US? on Reddit

• 99% Invisible's Shade and Shade Redux

• What’s with all the closed rest areas on Colorado roads? by Nathaniel Minor for CPR.org

• Understanding Hostile Architecture: The Cause and Effect of Restricting Public Space from the Neighborhood DesignCenter

• City of Los Angeles Unveils Landmark Bus Shelters Program from som.com

• Where Did All the Public Bathrooms Go? by Elizabeth Yuko for Bloomberg

• When you gotta go, where to go? The crappy state of Colorado’s public restrooms by Nancy Lofholm for the Colorado Sun

• Where Have All the Water Fountains Gone? Here's Why We Should Bring Them Back by Patrick J. Kiger for howstuffworks

• Why old-fashioned highway rest stops are disappearing on 9News Colorado

• Episode 1: Cooling cities by throwing shade on Overheard at National Geographic with Eli Chen