Give Me Primitive Facilities

When my daughter was about 6 or 7 years old the two of us went tent camping in the nearby White Mountains of New Hampshire, at one of the National Forest campsites. The campsites that we had stayed in previous to this one had been very primitive as far as facilities go, with "out-house" type privies and no running water.

This particular campsite, remote though it was, had amenities such as showers, running water, and automatic flush toilets. My daughter, Amy, had never encountered this type of flush mechanism before. The toilets are supposed to automatically flush AFTER one arises from the commode. In Amy's case, however, she was so small and slender and squirmy that the mechanism tripped prematurely and flushed WHILE she was sitting on the pot. It scared the living daylights out of her, and from that point on it took much cajoling and coaxing to get her to do her business on one of those toilets.

The morning of our departure she woke up early and had to go, but neither of us wanted to go through the toilet torture again. I sleepily told her to go into the woods (which closely bordered our campsite) and pee behind a bush. Which she did. This novel experience so delighted her that when she came back to camp she kept saying (in a voice that I feared would carry through the early morning silence of the camp), "I peed in the WOODS! I PEED in the WOODS!" Give us primitive facilities any day!