Why “Greenshit”?
That's a disgusting name!
First some slightly irrelevant history.
In 1970 when we lived in Chicago, I took my family, my wife and one-year-old daughter, on a two-week camping trip to the desert southwest. Somehow I was deranged enough to drive our VW Camper down a remote flooded dirt road next to the Colorado River. Just past a potash plant 18 miles outside of Moab, I drove off the side of the road and got stuck in a ditch. I had to walk back to the plant in knee deep muddy water where I found someone to give me a ride back to Moab, while my wife and daughter stayed in the van tilted at a 30-degree angle in 2 feet of water.
I went here because months before, I fell crazy in love with a photo of Canyonlands National Park in a Rand McNally travel guide (shot from Dead Horse Point, of course). My heart was sooooo set on going there, I was willing to pay any price. But when we got near the park, I could not find a sign for Canyonlands anywhere. What kind of national park was this, with no sign? Surely there had to be a visitor center somewhere (there was none). The best I could tell from the finest maps we had (a Rand McNally Road Atlas and Amoco gas station maps), a right turn on a road to a place called Potash would take us there. Alas, this was not a recommended way in. The travel guide didn’t tell us that the vast majority of the park was only accessible by 4WD (and still is!). Even if I knew that, I foolishly believed my VW Camper was as good as any 4WD vehicle.
After many hours we got towed out, but we never made it to Canyonlands. Since that experience, I was determined to go back some day and do it right, with a real jeep.
Thirteen years later in 1983, while living (relatively) nearby in Omaha on a 1-year site assignment, I rented an old International Harvester Scout (one of the earliest SUVs) from a gas station in Moab, and with my two brothers took a 3-night camping trip to Canyonlands in the hottest part of summer. With no four-wheel-drive experience, I was ignorant enough to think that was enough time to get to the remotest area of the park, the Maze, a “mere” 80 miles from the nearest paved road. We didn’t make it all the way the first night, but we arrived on the 2nd day and had two good days in extreme solitude at the beautiful Maze Overlook campsite.
In the early 1980’s, the rule about poop was to do it in a hole 6 inches deep near a bush where it was most likely to decompose, burn your toilet paper in the hole, and then bury the mess. In the vicinity of an established campsite, even one as remote as the Maze Overlook, it seemed like everywhere you dug a hole there was ancient dried poop, so you had to walk several hundred feet from the campsite to find a virgin spot. So much for decomposition. (I assume this is a reason Canyonlands now requires campers to bring portable toilets.)
Naturally, while trying to get the toilet paper to burn completely on top of your moist poop pile, you had to spend some time studying poop. It became pretty obvious that each successive dump during that trip was greener than the previous. Upon discussing this bodily function with my brothers, we realized that all of us were shitting green. What was the reason for this? Was it something in our diet? Was it an illusion, the color of redrock reflecting off brown? Maybe it was a symptom of dehydration, because none of us were experienced drinking enough in the desert. It was a major topic of discussion, but remained a mystery.
The next year, while recruiting friends and relatives for a second trip, I decided, for a joke, to send out announcements on Greenshit Outings letterhead. I was able to gather a crew of four, and this meant we needed two vehicles. We wanted jeeps, and the nearest to Moab that we could rent jeeps for offroad use was 150 miles away in Ouray, Colorado. This time we allowed for a much more sensible 9-day trip. Still, it was an ambitious itinerary that included the Maze at the Doll House and a return down Poison Spring Canyon across the Dirty Devil River.
On this trip, dubbed Greenshit ’84, once again most of us pooped green. That cinched it: the Greenshit name was earned.
With each future trip, the name became more established, and by now it’s a household word among the 20 or so Greenshitters that have accompanied me over the years. We all know what it means to shit, and many of us can’t wait for the next opportunity to green the landscape. A “good shitter” is someone who loves the desert, is a responsible camper, behaves well in a remote place, and of course appreciates green. Conveniently, “green” in conventional jargon nowadays means respect for the environment, which also happens to be another important greenshitter quality.
On Utah trips, green poop consistently returned year after year. Alas, since we switched venues to Death Valley, the green has diminished. Not just for me, but others, too. I don’t know if the reason is lack of redrock, different diets, or maturing digestive systems that have learned to cope with the desert experience. A few years ago I Googled the topic and learned that bile secreted by the liver greenifies poop as it enters the small intenstine. The bile turns yellow and then brown as bacteria degrade it. But if it moves through too quicky, or the bacteria are dozing, the green color may persist to the end. I speculate that my own green deficiency anemia is caused by my aging tract, no longer able to pass those voluminous Greenshit meals so quickly. Constipation, I reckon, would give bacteria more time for bile consumption.
But still, we all maintain fond memories of green. Green or not, Greenshit will stick forever (so to speak).