The Tao of Poo
An itinerant ski writer finally takes time to smell
the roses.
By LESLIE ANTHONY

El Niño inhales a locomotive wind across the desert. Clouds slam alpine bowls, rock teeth tear them apart like smoke blown through a comb, and updrafts hang a clothesline of birds along the ridges.

Lake Tahoe shimmers in disco-ball shafts of sunlight, another too-perfect California cliché: splashed on every piece of state-tourism propaganda since the Gold Rush; completely lacking in mystique or allure; still looking good despite a hundred earthquake facelifts.

In the nearby Sierra, half a dozen skiers traverse dissolute snow into Sherwood Bowl behind Alpine Meadows ski area. Four are pros, working the chutes and cliff-drops for a living and hoping that another, a photographer, will make them all famous. Me? After milking the best untracked line—a cornice-and-cream-cheese screamer—to the valley floor, I have nothing to do but watch.

They may be hours and I could die of boredom down here. But I suddenly realize I won't, because the rock on which I sit is The Place Where Animals Go To Poo.



I don't notice it at first, unexpected and unwelcome as excrement tends to be, mostly because it comprises the same variegated browns as the Sierra's basaltic eruptions. It's the burgeoning heat that brings parfum d'anus to my attention, and, gazing around, I see that it is everywhere. Black, brown, charcoal, duff, chocolate, sienna, chestnut. Layer upon layer. Fresh, recent, ancient, sedimentary, decomposed, wet, dry, crushed. It is spread onto and otherwise commanding every solution pocket, depression, and flattened surface; a local monument to time's arrow and food's indelicate cycle.

On the fresh ledger, shapes are myriad: the overstated symmetry of ungulate dung, the shotgun scatter of rodent pellets, and the lumpy, hair-and-bone-packed turd-trains of small carnivores, with their tapered ends and Dairy Queen flourishes. It's no Elephant's Graveyard, but impressive and rife with reverence nonetheless.

An island of dietary dirt in a sea of aching white.

Mesmerized into full-scale meditation on the form and function of animal scat, I consider the price of coprolites (the much-prized fossilized feces of dinosaurs), move on to the bio-hazard, disease-rating of bat guano, briefly entertain the fact that birds probably have the most fun with their excreta, and land up at the horrible realization that the effluent of aquatic creatures great and small dissolves instantly into whatever water body it is deposited. Meaning that swimming in anything other than a man-made pool, is, quite literally, bobbing in a toilet. And, alas, even backyard pools are susceptible to the "little Johnny" factor.

This comedic cliché, plumbed endlessly in film, leads all-too-naturally to that collective fount of fond reminiscence shared with some loathing by all humans: Great Shit Stories I Have Known. For my part there was Michael Francis Evans' mad—though sadly unsuccessful—dash through the mall to heed an impending four-alarm dump; my daughter's diaperless, head-to-toe explosion in the middle of a California IKEA; the squirrel in Toronto, the gull in Christchurch, and a bevy of other direct hits.

But there are none quite so fond as one on which I have dwelt in print before. In the Nevada desert adjacent to the remote Toiyabe Range, while my companions (also skiers—coincidence?) searched vainly through sage scrub for a rumored hot spring, I'd made a startling discovery. Placing my head parallel to the hard-packed earth, I had marveled with some languor over what was clearly one of the seven wonders of the fecal world.

I theorized that the "structure"—and it definitely had all the hallmarks of assembly—had been rendered by a canid of some sort. Simultaneously trying to sniff each piece of excrement as it appeared, it had dragged itself around on its haunches in an inadvertent arc, serendipitously creating a circle. Satisfied, it abandoned the result to the vicissitudes of the dry, high-plains air, the various components tilted crazily but somehow remaining upright; a perfect ring whose mystical and archaeological significance would be pondered for months by a parade of ant scholars and dung-beetle historians: Turdhenge.

But that was years ago, a random occurrence, and really, other than fortuitous preservation, what does it have to do with The Place Where Animals Go To Poo? Not much. Like all such monuments, Turdhenge was heavy and auspicious, while TPWAGTP is, at this moment, positively fun. Why, even Dr. Seuss might create a classic out of it. The Lorex Lobs a Log or some such nonsense:

Inky dinky wombat woo
Where trees are bending two-by-two
A winter's worth of doo-doo do
At the place where animals go to poo...



On closer examination I note that no matter their age or state, each nugget glistens with a veneer of recent rejuvenation. I know it has rained, and so take comfort in the knowledge that dung is one of the few substances on earth that can be rendered instantly fresh by the simple addition of water. I imagine the article in Martha Stewart Living—"Holy Shit: bringing dried crap to life for the holidays."

There would be moss and ribbons.

South Park would finally be vindicated for their "Christmas Turd" episode. The real "Tao of Poo" (neé Pooh) would finally enter pop culture, with its own parent-addling lexicon. Oprah wouldn't touch it, of course, because nobody would cry. Dr. Phil couldn't help either, because even his lopsided sincerity would crumble under the inevitable tsunami of laughter. But maybe Tony Robbins could use this very human tendency toward nervous mirth to go on a jag about The Power of Number Two.

Thankfully my friends at Alpine Meadows finish their heroic leaps, turns, and slashes on the snow above and beeline for the valley, arriving one-by-one at my outpost. I offer thoughts and insight about my discovery. Unimpressed with my prodigious display of forensic scatology, they assume I've fabricated the entire thing in an effort to keep from sharing my rock.

I consider whether my brief obsession is really a cry for help.

Since none is forthcoming, I rescue myself from the rock's grotty grip, and follow reluctantly as the group meanders downvalley toward civilization and the land of porcelain receptacles. It's late and a long way back to the base from The Place Where Animals Go To Poo.

Sliding through rapidly crusting snow, a final thought on the juxtaposition of origin and destination crashes through: While skiers huddle under neon Budweiser signs in a cheesy bar over the ridge, partaking in the ritual slaughter of any health gains made by the day's physical output, an animal synod gathers on the rock in the dusk for their own back-patting session: aprés pee.

Skiers celebrate exertion, animals excretion.

It’s nature's way.

Leslie Anthony is the editor of SBC Skier.


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