Don't Shit Where You Eat

Most writers simply make up camping stories, but I'll say this: when kicked out of the house and wandering, one sometimes finds a place that would make a killer hideout. Requirements are that it looks wholly natural from the outside, is in an area not likely to be discovered and has access to air and enough places to hide the prized possessions of childhood mixed with items of practicality. But with it come several rules: don't smoke inside, it gives away the location. If you're going out, do it cautiously and come back discretely for the same reason. If anything near your place is disturbed by your passing, make it look natural as best you can. And finally: since we're going to be sneaking food back here, if you have to crap don't do it anywhere near the hideout, as the stench alone will put you off your feed.

The country kids near my uncle's farm had a hideout in the corner of an irrigation ditch where a tree had fallen over, leaving a natural cave. They'd dump out the dirt far afield and smudge its redder coloring in with the tannish surface mud. Down the alley some city kids had taken over the diagonal territory between a corner wall and the elliptical edge of an alley. Around a center drain and a small patch of weeds they built a place you had to jump a wall to find. I knew even some rich kids who took over an outbuilding on a disused estate by convincing the housekeeping staff that the gardening staff needed the building, and vice versa. They had a radio transmitter in there and one of them was on his sixth crop of Mangolian Indica by the time someone, curious about the electric bill, found his transformer and bulb. Any red-blooded human desires some place where others are not, and often, this has to be found outside of the rules others impose.

In every single one of these special places, however, there is a primary rule: don't shit where you eat. Or sleep. Or want to have friends. This rule isn't hard to follow, but if we back up a minute and conceive of this universe as our neighborhood, and earth as one out of billions of planets as our specific hideaway, we would see how we've been doing nothing but that for years. Our oceans are filling with toxic goo. Our air no longer resembles the clean and pure we read about in books. Many species and whole ecosystems have been eliminated for the convenience of money. Constant signals of many frequencies saturate our atmosphere, and in landfills tons of rotting junk emits toxic chemicals into soil and air and water. Abundances of pesticides and other useful chemicals throw natural systems out of balance, flooding whole local areas with unnecessary organisms that procede to destroy all other aspects of the food chain with their excess. If earth were our hideout, we'd be knee deep in shit.