It´s like when you really, really gotta go -- and then you go. It hit me on the trail beside a lake in a sharp-edged glacial valley, eleven miles from a toilet, but so what? -- I had a trowel and a few folds of paper, except there were all these people around, other hikers, dozens of Ôem like ants on a picnic, indifferent to my internal pressure, and all around us the high alpine valley, no trees, just the lake and smooth steep valley walls, no where to hide, no where a guy could get a little privacy for that quality time alone, so I set out in the only direction I could go -- up, up, up the valley wall, higher and higher, further and further from all those hikers, but every time I turned around I could still see them, which meant they could see me, which meant I had to climb higher and higher still, until finally -- finally, I passed between a pair of scrappy junipers and into a little hollow filled with flowers and ground squirrels, and I had that sensation that Brigham Young must have felt gazing out at the valley of the Great Salt Lake, "Yes, this is the place." So I find a likely spot and I flip over a rock and scrape out a hollow with my trowel and I crouch there, pants around my ankles wind cool across my backside and I wait, and wait, and wait, and wouldn´t you know it? -- nothing happens, nothing except my tension builds and the need to go increases and I try to tell myself think about something else, anything else, so I watch the ground squirrels, watch them chirp and caper about and still I have to go and still I´m not going, and still those damn squirrels caper, except suddenly they stop, suddenly they stand on their haunches all at once, a troop at attention, then they launch themselves screeching into their holes because here some damn thing comes shambling into the clearing, all shaggy fur and teeth and claws, who knows what it is, and it tears into one of those squirrel holes digging and snuffling, and all I can do is watch, my pants around my ankles and I really have to go, and I mean go in the most potently euphemistic sense of the word, but nothing comes out -- and then the hairy horror stops digging and pulls itself outa the hole and turns its toothsome gaze on me, and it was like when you really, really gotta go, and then, by golly, you go. . .

Text:Mehmet Cem Turkkal

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