bleckblog: musings of a community college english teacher

This past weekend I went on a long two-day bike ride, The Tour des Lacs, put on by a local group. The first day was 123 miles and rather cold and the second 72 miles and a bit warmer, even sunny, but that's not what I want to write about. One the second day, at the first food/rest stop, at a park along the way, there was a very old fashioned, some might even say quaint, public toilet. What made it this was was the trough urinal where three or four men/boys could stand shoulder-to-shoulder and do their business before getting back on their bikes. Urinals of this sort seem pretty much a thing of the past, and in north Idaho, that often means a thing of the present.

What got me thinking about this, and ultimately led to this post, is how many of the riders reacted to the urinal. When I first walked into the small room, all I saw was the toilet and I thought it was one-man-at-a-time place. Then I peeked around the door and saw the urinal. At first I thought it was a sink, but the real sink along the other wall dispelled that mistaken notion. Then I realized what it was, a roughly four-foot long ceramic-coated/glazed cast-iron trough urinal. Just like the old days! Since cyclists drink lots of fluids, at least if they are smart, standing in line is not something one wants to do much. So I bellied up to the trough and did what is done in such a place. Soon another cyclist poked his head in the door, saw me at the trough and someone else at the toilet and said, "Whoops, sorry" and stepped back outside to wait his turn.

I told him there was no need to apologize, that this was a multi-user urinal and he could just come on in and take care of his business. And he did. But many others wouldn't. They continued to queue up outside the door, waiting to stand by themselves at the toilet rather than stand beside another, with no barrier between them, while relieving themselves. And this got me thinking, which is something you have lots of time to do when riding a bike over nearly 200 miles in two days. And this is what I got to thinking about:

What is it about public toilets, and our no longer being willing to urinate next to someone (men anyway, women always had a greater degree of privacy to go with their longer waits in line) without some shield in place? What does this tell us about notions of public and private spaces and how they come together? What does this tell us about being isolated as an individual, needing a sense of privacy, when amongst a crowd or the general public? How much do modern public toilets create or add to overall alienation and isolation? How much did trough type urinals serve to keep such barriers from forming? Clearly this is nothing but idle speculation and musing on my part, but it seems that as we increase the sense of privacy, however real or imagined it might be, when we are in public spaces, then there is something of a breakdown occuring within civil society. We see it in ipod isolation, private cell phone conversations in public, road rage, and likely many other forms of public behavior that fails to acknowledge the publicness of an act or space. And there you have it.