The pizza
oven and water heater kicked off a desire for more home improvement. And one
piece of home improvement topped the list more than any other. Unfortunately,
it required a lot of know-how. And, really, how often do you think about how
your toilet works?
While
porcelain ceramic was the standard, I didn’t have access to that kind of
material. Pottery was a second choice, but we were talking a lot of pottery,
and I didn’t know if it would hold up.
Gotta
try, though.
I spent days making drawings; I had
never done more than doodle in my spare time, like every delinquent high school
student, but I concentrated and made detailed sketches of everything I could
think of.
We did small-scale experiments
putting bits of food in a model and pouring in more water to flush it down. The
snake-like trap was pretty easy to figure out, but for the life of me I
couldn’t figure out how to get water from the tank to run along the inside of
the bowl for the flush. I also knew that there was a flapper and a float, but
had no idea how everything actually came together. I wasn’t an inventor, and
this wasn’t A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court. I just wanted to be able to take a dump like a civilized
human being.
After a dozen models and halve a
dozen failed full-size attempts, I finally carted back a thick, glazed pottery
commode to my cottage. I had already built a new outhouse, and set to work
installing everything. I had even put in some drainage pipes underground to
take the waste down the hill to a field. It was all organic, right?
With it all set up, I did tests,
using a bucket to pour water into the bowl. I watched as it filled, then
swirled down like it was supposed to. I went down the hill to the field, where
the pipe finally emerged above ground to see the water flowing out. A few more
tests, this time with bits of bread and potato to simulate, and it all worked
perfectly.
I grinned
like an idiot at the accomplishment, then frowned. “Now I need to figure out
toilet paper.”