Now I'm going to talk about poo. A lot.

The Public Health call to explain proper camp sanitation confounded me for a full half-second: when I was a kid and camping with the Girl Scouts, we never went anywhere without running water, and so the concept of having to make sure no one was peeing in your camp was . . . bewildering. Then I remembered: my troop was a bunch of wimps.

Now, the Handbook itself seems a little confused about how to talk about camp sanitation without either a) getting a little overly familiar with bodily functions or b) reminding scouts that they are not the invulnerable supermen the Handbook usually encourages them to be. In fact, the entire sanitation section spans a little less than a third of a page, largely exhorting the campers to burn or bury garbage and to make sure their water supply is "carefully examined," though there's no real explanation for how to do it. Of course, if I were a 1911 boy (lots of big hypotheticals there, buddy), I'd lean towards boiling, followed by the addition of a few drops of 2% iodine or bleach. Now, I might even consider some water purification tablets (or the kind of awesome-looking portable pumps), though the last time I did much camping I just hauled around a big honking jug of water. The water purification advice, though, is one where the Handbook shows its age. Rather than giving much advice for how the scout can tell if water needs purification or not -- and rather than advising the scout to just go ahead and boil all his water anyway -- it sort of throws up its hands, urges immunization, and moves on to the next bit.

Surprisingly, also, there's no additional advice regarding the location or construction of one's latrine, which was always a big concern of a friend's father, who kept urging my preteen Brownie troop to consider -- just this once -- forgoing the campsite-provided restrooms. Weird. The friend's-father had a lot of suggestions, many of which sounded nightmarish to me at the time, and at least one of which, I'm like 90% certain, involved installing ropes along trees so we could lean back over a latrine pit without falling in. (I can find no confirmation of this kind of thing on the internet, so it may just be that I was nine and had an incredible imagination, because I always pictured this as like the American Gladiators of bathroom-use, and I would be delighted to have someone confirm this for me.)

I have a feeling the Handbook would have some great suggestions -- and some elaborate ones -- for latrine building, if only they had the nerve to publish them. It's delicacy, I think, that's holding us back, not a lack of ideas. Even something simple -- that a latrine should be downhill from the campsite, far from water, and several feet deep -- would do the trick. But, in 1911, I think the Handbook wants to preserve our decorum more than it really wants to help out.

As usual, the Handbook delights me the most when it totally abandons all attempts at any instruction that's not of a moral nature. One agreeing that we'll all look real close at the water and nothing else, the Handbook emphasizes the importance of following its agreed-upon rules: "A scout's honor will not permit him to disobey in the slightest particular the sanitary rules of his camp." Right on, buddy.

If you'll excuse me, I have to go cook dinner.