“The crocheted crop top sweater I’m now realizing, was pretty fucked up planning on my behalf…” It was nearly 70 degrees when we left St Petersburg some ten hours ago and drove roughly due north. Now we’re both shivering, trying to warm our hands as we run from the cozy warmth of the car and through the 28 degree parking lot as dusk settles over the small rural town.
Upon entry we’re blasted with a stream of warm air, we patrol the aisles… we’ve got many a mission this trip but first: we have a bucket list.
Walking up and down we search for anything that can be used. Me finding the most ridiculous vessels for such a purpose, her sticking to the task at hand, me laughing… bouncing up and down the nearly customer-less store.
We make it almost through the entire store, passing up brightly colored beach pails, cheap disposable aluminum turkey roasting pans, cat boxes… before I find some navy blue plastic buckets. Small… but as I demonstrate by squatting nearly all my weight onto the little bucket, strong enough. We’re both laughing now…
The house is just ten minutes away but at this point, with no public restroom in site and my ill prepared fashion induced shivering, I wonder if I’ll make it. It’s getting very dark now, nearly pitch black. There are no streetlights to illuminate the windy mountain road as we snake alongside a tumultuous river churning a reddish brown from the five inches of rain they had just several days ago. Now water drains and drips and cascades from the steep rock face to our left as we turn off the river road and begin to make our ascent up the mountain to her home.
The excavator is there. Her neighbor turned godsend, turned general contractor, is expertly lifting an old drainage pipe from the front end of her driveway, the last bit of daylight drains from the sky, the thick reddish mud, the orange excavator, the flannel shirt he’s wearing, the trees, the sky, everything begins to take on a charcoal gray hue, a loss of color saturation, as the dark creeps over everything. We walk inside her cabin, chilled to the bone, mud stuck thick to our boots, it’s nearly pitch dark inside but we can still make out the caked mud thick and dry on the old kitchen and living room subfloors, the old cabinets and appliances gutted, hauled off, cold air flows in through the bathroom where the floors have holes and part of the wall opens to the outside. The toilet, the shower, the sink… everything is gone save for the bathroom door propped up against the living room wall, some lumber to fix the floors and walls in the gutted kitchen and an old wooden table, abandoned with the house at some point in time, now filled with empty plastic bottles, a crumpled white paper bag and some power tools.
She has her cat in her carrier, she told me she’s going to go back to the car for the litter box. Her cat hasn’t used the litter box in ten hours now. I have the space heater and my bags along with our two buckets. I tell her that I’m going to set up our buckets, help her bring in some stuff, then we can set up her room, the one ‘liveable’ room in the house with the only remaining heat source and all walls fully intact. We will be camping out in her cabin for the next few days, helping to make it as liveable as possible until her ‘tiny home’ - a 40’ boat can be delivered to the mountain cabin, its final resting place: overlooking a small koi pond and stream. But for now… all I can think about is the bucket and she’s working on the litter box… that poor kitty probably has to go…
There’s one small overhead light in the bedroom. We flip it on, suddenly the room is a fishbowl, the two curtain-less windows put us on some sort of weird display, like a human experiment on how people would live with no running water, sketchy electricity, zero appliances, a house full of thick dry mud and no heat as lacy swirls of snow begin to fall outside.
She gently puts the cat in the carrier on her cot, her queen mattress has been hauled a few days ago by my husband, into her room. Now it sits propped against the wall. The floor is relatively clean (all things considered) covered in a cheap gray wood look linoleum that curls up at the threshold and unnaturally waves in curious ripples across the room, two of the opposing walls are a dark green, the other two beige, the back of the door a dark charcoal gray, the white marker-ed scrawl of at least two teenagers long moved out, declaring that “JENNA is HOT” and “Obvi”… on the green wall with the closet two rectangular beige spots flank the doorless entry, two screw holes in the top center of the beige rectangles… “Looks like they painted in here without taking down the pictures first…” she says before closing the door behind her to keep the cat in and the cold out while she heads to the car to get the litter box.
Looking at the dark green haphhazardly painted stains along the perimeter of the popcorn ceiling… “There were definitely some choices made here,” I called through the door. The cat has left the carrier and she’s watching me now. I quickly plug in the small space heater and turn it on high then go about readying the bucket. I’ve never done this before and with the utmost need for sanitation and no running water, I’m problem solving as I go. A liner… A liner makes the most sense. But then what?
Cat litter!
I tear open the box we picked up at the store and clumsily grab fistfuls to toss into the bucket. I place the bucket down onto the closet floor, wondering if there’s a way to get some privacy as I nervously gaze out the window up the mountain to her neighbor’s front porch lit up in the dark… a direct view into her small room, but before I can devote too much attention to the task at hand her cat, impatient with the whole thing hops into OUR bucket, my bucket… and urinates expertly between the bucket and impromptu plastic bag liner, completely missing the litter and soiling our bucket all while maintaining what can only be described as a ‘mocking’ eye contact.
“What in the actual fuck…” I’m laughing as the cat pees, fitting its entire body into the small Dollar Tree bucket, “This is some fucked up shit…”
And it was… I thought as the cat finished up and I took one last awkward glance out the window wondering if her neighbors were about to watch me pee in closet… in a bucket-. My friend had told me that she had some cardboard in the windows at one point and her neighbor asked her about it, wanted to know if she thought he was some kind of pervert, because he and his family weren’t the kind of people that busied themselves with peeping into other people’s business… I laughed when she told me, “But yeah does he know that WE ARE the kind of people that shit in buckets and he shouldn’t have to accidentally see that?” We roared with that one.
“Fuck it” and my pants were down around my ankles as I shivered and peed in the bucket… after the cat. In a poor attempt to regain some shred of self respect, I let the cat know that at least I could get my pee in the bag and not in between the bag and the bucket. If the cat could talk I’m sure she’d have brought up the fact that I was still, regardless of aim, pissing in a bucket… after her… the domesticated house cat. Which would be both true and also fair.
When I finished up, I wiped my hands with a baby wipe from the thick pack we had brought in from the car, tossing the used wipe into the bucket, pulled on a fleece jacket and slipped out of the bedroom to help my friend bring in our necessities for the evening.
Outside the excavator had gone still and silent, her neighbor had gone home, the thick red mud’s color invisible in the dark was beginning to freeze with the raw cold of night, crispy dry snow flurries danced on the air and landed on our coats and boots and pants where they quickly melted. Our backs were hunched in the cold as we hurriedly dug through the backseat for anything we’d need for the night, an attempt made difficult by both the freezing temps and moonless night.
In her room we set up the bed-frame, managed to wrangle the mattress onto said frame and get the bed made with blankets before we left the comfort of the small room with the cozy little space heater and retired to sit on old lumber and a step stool in the shell of her frigid living room. We packed a bong and took turns inhaling the thick warm smoke, filling our chests and warming our feet in front of the space heater, me telling my friend the story about the cat and our bucket and how her cat has shit aim and yet apparently I was somehow still the lesser on the piss bucket totem…
We laughed before doing our best to brush our teeth using a gallon jug of water on a snow dusted porch in the pitch dark before retiring for the evening, me wondering out loud if we would wake up in the morning… the old space heater, lack of smoke detector and the shoddy electric to boot making me laugh at the thought… “Can you imagine the coroner coming in here and finding the bucket? They’d want to know what in the absolute fuck was happening up here, all of us just pissing in fucking buckets… and our toasted corpses just roasted right up…” We laughed at the absurdity of it all.
Last year on a girl’s road trip we had found the place quite accidentally, me mentioning that an unsavory former St Petersburg resident who had (allegedly) illegally operated a local non-profit and embezzled enough of the donations to buy nearly a half million dollar home for cash, in the very town we were driving by. Low key obsessed with the saga at the time, I had convinced her to take a quick side track of the town to see if we could find the embezzler. We never found him or his home but we did find a derelict cabin off a windy mountain road on nearly an acre of land. She put in an offer the next day and closed on the home two months later. Her goal was to buy something outright, get mortgage free… start a new life, bottom up after having to end a marriage and getting priced out of our now gentrified city.
And now here we were, four months later, she was completely moved out of her St Petersburg apartment, my husband drove her UHaul up to her NC cabin for her just a few days before he flew back to St Pete and we drove her car up so I could make the long drive with her and lend some moral support. Originally the plan had been to buy the cabin (a real fixer upper) and the Airbnb boat we had found on Facebook Marketplace; she would live in the boat while the cabin was renovated, then rent out the boat as an Airbnb once the cabin was live-able. Money however had been quickly drained for the land renovations needed to get the boat a final resting place. On top of that the original boat mover had bailed on the original boat move several months ago, getting the boat from Tampa to her western NC mountain town and dropping it off to a nearby storage facility after admitting that he had never visited the property as promised to survey the site. Now the boat sat in storage and her neighbor slowly continued the landscaping. Once the boat came she would have a finished and clean living space complete with all the modern conveniences (like a working toilet, shower and sink) one might be accustomed to until her cabin was renovated… but unfortunately until that boat came… we were waiting… and roughing it… which was now our new plan.
We slept like shit. Me too warm in the bed with my multiple layers and blankets and the looming space heater cranking, and her too cold in the cot, shivering. The next morning upon commenting on our sleeping woes, we laughed at the disparate conditions yet decided that we were thankful we weren’t fire victims burned alive by the questionable space heater with our bucket of urine and now a steaming poo I had just unceremoniously added to the bucket.
After the embarrassing bucket poo I told her that I was indeed still one classy fucking lady, that this bucket crap would not define me… and she chuckled, nodding her head as if in solidarity, before letting me know that she would just hold her business until we made it down the mountain and found a public restroom…
…TOO BE CONTINUED
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