When it’s potty time in the neighbourhood

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/08/2023 (786 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is universal, even if we don’t like to talk about it.

Not to put too fine a point on it — we eat; we excrete.

In big and busy cities like Winnipeg, that isn’t always an easy equation.

Private businesses often don’t provide public washroom access: some demand purchases, others simply have washrooms for staff, no matter how urgent the need.

And that’s understandable: there’s the cleaning, the hassle, the regular damage and destruction of facilities, and the risk that anything from drug overdoses on down is going to happen in the narrow relative privacy of a toilet cubicle.

But that doesn’t change the need.

Search public washrooms in Winnipeg on the internet, and you quickly find seven formal sites: six official city facilities, some that move, and the permanent facility at Main and Higgins. You can read about plans for another permanent site, but there’s no description of where it might be, beyond, potentially, the West End.

A local website, Winnipee, shows many, many more.

There are, of course, even more than that: people who have to travel long distances on foot or by bike to work or school build up their own unofficial and private indexes of handy washrooms to stop at along their routes if it becomes necessary.

And then there’s the one on my street. At least, there was.

A one-seat portable toilet, it is made of the same sort of thick plastic playground slides are made of, a shack of extruded panels that has a particular sound — a hollow “thwack” — when its door is slammed. Hear it once, and you’ll recognize the sound the next time you hear it. Hear it enough, and you can conjure it up from memory.

I can conjure the sound up from memory.

At one point in the last few weeks, I had construction crews working on both sides of our house, all of them depending on the café-au-lait-brown porta-potty that sits in front of a neighbour’s house. During those few weeks, I was doing work outside in the evenings and on weekends, able to loosely monitor the goings-on.

One crew was doing asphalt re-topping work; the other, completely tearing apart a side street and starting anew, digging right down, it seemed, to the rarely-discussed but always-depended-on realm of the sewers.

One of the asphalt workers liked to sing loudly when he was in the tiny shack: perhaps he thought the walls afforded greater privacy than they actually do. His musical stylings would warble up out of the structure, your ears somehow suggesting the sound was coming directly from the facility’s vent stack.

The portable toilet got heavy usage from the crews; but eventually, the asphalt crew moved on to new tasks.

The shack remained — and still got heavy usage.

Early one Saturday morning, I saw a man with a bicycle tire around his neck and a collection of tin cans in a clear plastic bag prop his bicycle against the side of the small toilet, stacking his belongings carefully on top of the leaning bicycle and against the side of the small structure before going inside.

Walkers stopped to use it regularly, as did runners and the occasional bicyclist. Several times, cars would stop on the street and people would rush into the small porta-potty. One passerby leashed his dog to a fence, used the facilities, then stooped to clean up after the dog.

There were far more I didn’t see, but heard with the hollow plastic door thwacking shut in the quiet of open-windowed hot nights. A steady clientele of those who found themselves in need. (In Newfoundland, where I lived for many years, one of the sayings for that need is that you’ve been “short taken.”)

It’s probably worth mentioning here that access to sanitation is a human right, recognized as such by the United Nations over a decade ago. And it goes without saying that, in the absence of a formal place to relieve themselves, people still will. There has to be a better way.

This past Saturday, there was a lock on the door of the unlikely neighbourhood washroom — a simple small padlock.

Traffic still stopped for drivers to check if the facilities were available, passersby still angled in towards the door until they saw the lock.

Guests of all shapes, sizes and economic circumstances. Unified by simply being human. We forget that sometimes.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press.