Dirty Baby, Healthy Baby? Early Filth May Reduce Allergies
Kids who play in the mud and muck are healthier.
Mud and Muck
ATVs still running amuck
Or so the people over at Adirondack Explorer want you to believe …
It’s a warm and sunny morning on the old dirt road between Harrisburg Lake and Wilcox Lake in Warren County, the sky above brilliant blue, the woods full of birdsong. A beautiful day to be hiking in the Forest Preserve.
Unfortunately, I have to watch where I step. The trail is full of deep and muddy ruts, the ugly kind that can ruin your boots. It takes some of the fun out of hiking.
Muddy ruts are commonplace in parts of the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest, the Independence River Wild Forest, and many other tracts of the forever-wild Forest Preserve. Usually, they have been created by all-terrain vehicles.
Seven years after the state Department of Environmental Conservation banned ATVs from state land in the Adirondacks and Catskills to stop “illegal and inappropriate ATV use … and to ensure that the resources of the Forest Preserve are protected,” trails are still being chewed up by the four-wheel vehicles.
No Pissing Allowed
There is some things that particularly suck about urban areas. One of them is simply the lack of places to take a piss, particularly after doing a fair bit of drinking.
I don’t know about you, but at least for me after drinking, I usually need to take a piss. When I’m in the woods, it’s not a big deal — every tree works just fine for me. And when I get even more piss drunk, then basically everywhere outside of my pickup is just fine, including the campfire.
It’s kind of nasty, when your sleeping in your bed of your pickup, and you piss on the tailgate. So even in the sticks, you want to aim outside of the pickup. But in urban areas you have to be much more careful where and when you piss.
It’s normally not a big deal. Especially in rural areas, where they’re be nobody smelling it, and the rain will quickly wash the piss and the nitrogen-loaded compounds away. Nobody complains about when a horse or a cow lifts up their tail to spray out gallons of urine in a pasture.
I realize there may be problems with letting people take a piss in urban areas. High levels of nitrogen in one spot will cause the grass to die, as my dog ever so articulately demonstrated with his favorite winter pissing spots, where the snow isn’t so deep.
Then there is whole problem with all those perverted folks, who don’t want to piss but just show off their equipment in our puritan society, which gets people upset when somebody has fake plastic truck nuts on their pickup. We are too much of a honey society that’s paranoid about any reference of sexuality. Don’t let the kids near the pasture when the bull’s out there doing his thing! They might just get idears about what farm animals do.
Yet, I’m sure the major problem with urban pissing, it would just make everything smell like a beef feedlot. As they say, a few gallons of urine being pissed into the pasture, doesn’t really smell like much. Yet, you go to a feedlot, and you know there are lot of cows there, as they are getting fatten up to make your steak tasty.
Cities suck. America should be rural and free, and be a place where people can piss wherever and whenever people want to do such an important activity. This is why we as a society need more acres of pasture, and less of asphalt.