There has also been plenty of comic celebration of gas here in America. The greatest of American poot humorists is Benjamin Franklin, whose wonderful open letter “To the Royal Academy of Farting” (circa 1781) suggests that the discovery of a means to convert flatulence into something more pleasing would represent a monumental contribution of science to humanity. In Mo-by-Dick, Melville wastes no time getting to the fart jokes in the novel’s opening chapter, where Ishmael explains: “I always go to sea as a common sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim).” Ishmael here refers not to the Pythagorean theorem you vaguely remember from eighth-grade math class but rather to the Pythagorean maxim, which is the injunction to avoid eating beans because they tend to fire up the trouser trumpet.
It is exactly this Pythagorean flatulaphobia that Edward Abbey, that most outspoken of environmental humorists, denounces in the work of his literary forefather, Henry David Thoreau. In “Down the River with Henry Thoreau,” Cactus Ed first describes his own breakfast, then pivots to an incisive critique of Thoreau’s take on food and farting:
Scrambled eggs, bacon, green chiles for breakfast, with hot salsa, toasted tortillas, and leftover baked potatoes sliced and fried. A gallon or two of coffee, tea and—for me—the usual breakfast beer. Henry would not have approved of this gourmandising. To hell with him. I do not approve of his fastidious puritanism….Thoreau recommends a diet of raw fruits and vegetables; like a Pythagorean, he finds even beans impure, since the flatulence that beans induce disturbs his more ethereal meditations. (He would not agree with most men that “farting is such sweet sorrow.”)
In referencing flatulence in this comic send-up of a romantic line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Ed Abbey invokes the material reality of the body to simultaneously challenge Thoreau and parody Shakespeare—no small achievement. Abbey knows not only that farts are funny but also why. Flatulence has been a perennial staple of literary comedy because of the remarkable power of a fart to explode human pretensions. And that is why we humorists keep our comic farts aimed directly at high culture—because a healthy ripper is an attack upon oppressive cultural authority and a powerful assertion of freedom and independence.
If the literary history of flatulence is distinguished, the natural history of farting is perfectly enthralling. Fart gas is composed of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and, for only about a third of us, nitrogen (whether nitrogen is present in our flatulence is a product of heredity, like the color of our eyes or hair)—as well as small amounts of the mercaptans and hydrogen sulfide that give butt burps their notorious stench. When we squeak one out, the vapor we release is produced by the air we gulp, gas diffused into our intestines from our bloodstream, and, most important, gas produced by the bacteria that inhabit our intestines and digest much of our food for us. In this sense every fanny bleat is the product of an amazing symbiotic, interspecies collaboration without which we simply could not survive. And here I paraphrase the poet Galway Kinnell’s irrefutable scatological insight that those who don’t poop don’t live, while those who do do doo doo do. The same may be said of flatulence. As mammals, every one of us is living a Fart or Die existence.
You heard me right: all mammals fart. From packrats to mountain lions to whales. Turtles have exceptionally fetid farts. Termites are prodigious farters. Herpetologists can locate certain species of snakes by the unique odor of their farts. But among mammals farting is universal. Have you ever scanned the boggling diversity of the class Mammalia, that vast clade of endothermic amniotes, and wondered what unites us all? Well, I can tell you. It is the expulsion of intestinal gas through the anus. If you’re a mammal, you’re in the Guild of Flatus. You fart.
And if you’re a human mammal, you fart a lot. On average, each of us produces a half liter of gas each day; scientific consensus puts the average daily numerical fart count at fourteen. And, ladies, don’t blame the guys for peeling the paint. Although we men generally expel a greater volume of gas than you do, your flatulence has a higher concentration of the most odoriferous gases, so it all evens out in the end, so to speak.
The impressive frequency of human intestinal gas release—not to mention its telltale acoustic and olfactory potency—is obviously at odds with widespread social prohibitions against public farting. Never mind burning rubber in church or freeping during your own nuptials. Pretty much any gas expulsion—even popping a wee fluffy—is considered rude in almost all social situations. So much so, in fact, that public farting often leads to a secondary difficulty I refer to as “the problem of attribution.” In a cowardly attempt to shift the blame we pin our poofs on the dog, or even on poor old grannie. We cough or scrape a chair leg to disguise the sound; we sidle away from the scene of the crime to flee responsibility for the stench. The problem of attribution has led to myriad—and for some reason always rhyming—fart blaming phrases. We all know “He/she who smelt it dealt it,” but I prefer “he who deduced it produced it.” If I’m in a casual mood I go with “the smeller’s the feller.” When I’m feeling intellectual I instead opt for “she who inculpated promulgated.” There are also a variety of witty rejoinders to this kind of fart blaming. I’m especially fond of “whoever rhymed it crimed it.”
When Hannah came of age for instruction in basic social etiquette, we taught her to say “excuse me” whenever she delivered a benchwarmer. But she didn’t understand what we grown-ups know, which is that you say “excuse me” only once the cat is out of the bag. If you fart silently and expect to get away with it, then all etiquette bets are off. Not knowing this unwritten (and plainly hypocritical) social protocol, Hannah went around saying “excuse me” aloud all the time, which, because her flatulence was so quiet and inoffensive, was usually a mystery to other folks, who politely ignored her.
One day, however, my sister-in-law, Kate, asked in reply to one of Hannah’s requests for pardon, “Excuse you? What for, honey?”
“I tooted, Auntie,” Hannah replied, without a touch of shame or guilt.
Kate’s husband, Adam, my brother-in-law, was so surprised by the frequency of Hannah’s entreaties for forgiveness and so impressed with her unabashed candor that he suggested to Kate the brilliant idea that for a single week the two of them try the experiment of asking each other for forgiveness every time they did the one-cheek sneak. Adam specified that this obligation would remain in force whether they were together or apart. Always a gamer, Kate readily agreed, and an oath was sworn over wine. During the ensuing week there was a slew of gaseous emissions and admissions, the latter of which were duly confessed in person, by phone or email, or in text messages that read only “excuse me.” It was a long week, and that is because Kate and Adam had to beg forgiveness for something on the order of two hundred farts. They simply learned by experience what every gastroenterologist knows: we vent a lot of steamers, and it is not only normal but in fact imperative that we do so. Farts, like love, are an inevitable by-product of our humanity.
Our social mores deem it perfectly acceptable for a person to publicly take out a paper-thin tissue and blow mucus out of their face holes. When we sneeze, which is far grosser because the mucus is being propelled at almost 100 miles per hour and can have a spray radius of up to five feet, people actually bless us. If I am blessed for publicly detonating a high-velocity snot shower, why must I beg pardon for farting, as if it were a crime? So ingrained in the culture is this shame and embarrassment that it has even given rise to so-called “flatulence underwear,” the best-known brand of which is actually called Fartypants. The webpage advertising this forty-dollar product reads as follows: “Harnessing the same technology found in chemical warfare suits, these powerful pants are capable of stopping smells 200 times stronger than the average fart.”
So here’s the meditation with which I conclude this windy sermon. Why do
we allow a little backdraft to send us reeling off into repression and humiliation, into the buying of underwear made to withstand mustard gas? Why are we obliged to be ashamed of this fine reminder of the astonishing interspecies collaboration that is the human body, this small but important thing we have in common not only with each other but with kings and popes, and with every fellow mammal from aardvark to zebra?
Thankfully, the emancipatory solitude of Ranting Hill allows me the liberty to fart loudly, though I still find it difficult to do what Benjamin Franklin would likely have preferred, which is to fart proudly. If Ben were alive today, he’d probably blast his butt bugle and then fist-bump everybody around. I know better than to take his advice on this one, so when I’m in town I begrudgingly conform to socially enforced fart suppression. But as a desert rat and a grateful denizen of these western wilds, I’ve learned to appreciate that the sound of a healthy ripper is still a small but unmistakable anthem to true freedom and independence.
YOU MAY BE FORTUNATE, or, perhaps, unfortunate, enough to recall the 1954 science fiction flick Them!, which, like the radical environmental group Earth First!, had the audacity to include the exclamation point in its title. A classic fifties “Big Bug” B movie, Them! concerns a colony of ants that is accidentally irradiated (as were plenty of Nevadans and Utahans during the same period), producing mutated, monster-sized insects that rampage through New Mexico, crushing skulls and filling friendly Westerners with deadly formic acid. The adventure ends in the subterranean labyrinth of L.A.’s storm sewers, where, after pinching off a few human heads, the last of the creatures is destroyed, ensuring Americans that they had nothing left to fear but nuclear Armageddon with the Soviet Union. As a cinematic romp through Cold War anxieties, Them! gives us a monster to focus on other than ourselves, whose monstrous intelligence produced the nuclear horrors that still terrorize us today. Them! somehow affirms that it is easier to have your noggin compacted by the mandibles of a giant ant than to come to terms directly with having let the atomic genie out of the bottle.
Here in the western Great Basin Desert we have our own Them!, known to entomologists as Pogonomyrmex occidentalis. At least for now, the western harvester ant is about a quarter of an inch long instead of fifty feet long. This is convenient, because this insect’s venom has a lethal dose measurement of .12 mg/kg—a bug nerd’s way of saying that it is comparable in toxicity to that of a king cobra. Much is made of the harvester’s painful sting, but in my experience these guys do not attack unless you stand on them, which seems to me pretty reasonable. The sting itself is unpleasant, though I have never found it so severe as to be unresponsive to my famous “Three-Cold-Beer Remedy”: apply one to wound, drink other two, repeat as necessary.
Most Westerners have seen harvesters before. They are common in this region, and their colonies exist within mounds that are unmistakably denuded of all vegetation in a circle with an eight- or ten-foot diameter. This removal of all growth prevents shading and facilitates thermoregulation within the colony’s many tunnels, which extend down to the caliche—the desert hardpan that even the hydraulic auger on my tractor will not penetrate. We have lots of harvester colonies on Ranting Hill, but I have never found it necessary to exterminate them. The ants, which eat the seeds of desert grasses, are eaten by western fence lizards, which are eaten by Great Basin gopher snakes, which are eaten by red-tailed hawks—and if the economy goes south, I can always eat the hawks. Why antagonize cousin Pogonomyrmex? Even if there are fifteen thousand of them in each mound, they are still just wee little ants.
In early July, odd weather delivered an unusual, heavy rain on the heels of several days of very hot weather. On the day following the big rain, I noticed in our living room a few winged ants—an insect I had never seen around here before. Within moments there were many more ants than I could keep up with, even as I chased them around with the shop vac. Then, I noticed that something appeared to be moving behind the glass doors of the woodstove—a reflection off the glass, I thought at first. On approaching, however, I realized to my horror that the woodstove was seething with winged ants, which writhed against the glass by the thousands and wriggled out by the score. I sprinted out the front door and craned my neck to look at the roof, and that was when I had my Them! moment. Our tall chimney, which is stuccoed the color of desert sand, was now black with winged ants, whose countless millions and whose motivation for attacking our home remained equally inconceivable.
I sprinted back inside to see that hundreds of ants had escaped the stove in the time it had taken me to make my reconnaissance, and I realized, instantly, that I had a decision to make: I could continue fighting the ants a hundred at a time, until they filled our house, or I could take drastic action. In that instant I repositioned the shop vac, took a deep breath, and reached for the handle of the woodstove door, through which I now witnessed winged ants writhing in a foot-deep mass. Opening that door produced one of the ghastliest sights I have ever witnessed, as countless thousands of winged ants poured onto the hearth in a black wave, far exceeding my ability to control them, despite the vacuum inhaling at least fifty insects per second. Within five minutes ants were flying all over the house, but in that time I had also cleaned out the stove enough to ignite a few juniper sticks to make a smudge fire that stemmed further invasion from the chimney.
Because I’m the kind of natural history nerd who keeps the state entomologist’s phone number handy, I soon had an answer to the question of why this vermin horde had chosen me as its hapless victim. As it turned out, the invading winged ants were our western harvesters, which had found the weather conditions perfect for swarming. The chief entomologist explained to me that when several days of scorching hot weather are followed by unusually heavy rains, both female and male ants from all surrounding colonies sprout wings and immediately engage in “hill-topping”: they fly directly to the highest nearby point, which in this case was on top of the chimney, on top of our house, on top of Ranting Hill. There they formed “mating balls,” an unfortunate term that accurately describes the orgiastic clusters of thousands of insects whose dangerous liaison had filled our home with insanely horny ants. The conclusion of this process is that any newly mated female who does not end up in the belly of a fence lizard, kingbird, or shop vac will fly to a new site, tear off her own wings, burrow into the ground, lay eggs, and perhaps found a new colony, of which she will be queen.
I have resisted the temptation to nuke the harvester mounds around our house, though in the wake of the ghastly invasion I confess that I was sorely tempted. But I do need to feed the lizards around here, and I also have a desire to see this bizarre ritual enacted again some hot, wet summer day. According to indigenous Pima mythology, our planet was created from a sphere of ants. Maybe I fear that to open the Diazinon is to uncork the genie’s bottle right here at home, to rupture the silent bond that still abides between Them! and us.
ONE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S many prose lines of pure poetry (his poetry, by contrast, is as prosaic as the side of a milk carton) sings that “the blue-bird carries the sky on his back.” It is a line almost as lovely as the bird itself. The mountain bluebird, which is the state bird of Nevada, is a year-round resident here on Ranting Hill. The profusion of bluebirds here may be due to the unfair advantage the girls and I give them by mounting nesting boxes not only on our property but also (illegally, no doubt) on the public lands surrounding our home. There is hope in this small gesture of nailing little wooden homes into the tangled arms of junipers out here in the far reaches of the high desert.
Unfortunately, not all my associations with bluebirds are positive, for a bluebird restoration effort was my final merit badge project before being ejected from the Boy Scouts. To be more precise, I was formally excommunicated from scouting before managing to earn the “Arrow of Light,” a rite-of-passage symbol that sounds like a cross between a cheap appropriation of Native American mythology and a thinly veiled secularization of the ideology of a fun
damentalist religious cult. I realize that in saying this kind of thing I am stepping over an invisible line in our culture. I mean, who rags on the Boy Scouts? Especially among those of us who deeply value outdoor experience and wilderness skills—not to mention less practical attributes such as trustworthiness and honesty—there is something sacrosanct about scouting.
Before failing to become a Boy Scout I was, under duress, a Cub Scout. I made it just far enough to become a “Webelo,” which is scouting’s equivalent of a “tween,” a boy no longer a cub but not yet whatever is supposed to come next. A man? A bear? An eagle? A fake Indian? (Webelos are referred to as a “tribe,” a designation my Northern Paiute friends fail to appreciate.) To make matters worse, Webelos was given the “backronym” of “WE’ll BE LOyal Scouts,” which served as yet another reminder that the fundamental principle of the organization was unremitting conformity and respect for authority.
I submit as further evidence of this hierarchical authoritarianism the “Cub Scout Promise,” by which we were compelled to swear allegiance to God and country and to “obey the Law of the Pack,” which sounded vicious and scary. Worse still was the “Scout’s Law,” which enjoined us to be “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” Is this a reasonable standard for any kid? I suspect most parents would be satisfied with, “Look, you don’t have to be reverent or brave. Just stop hitting your brother.”
As a boy I took seriously the moral imperative to achieve that long, aspirant list of noble traits, which is to say that I was from the beginning doomed to failure. Since scouting emphasized absolute respect for authority, it seems clear enough that profoundly anti-authoritarian nature lovers such as Emerson and Thoreau—never mind true radicals like Thomas Jefferson or Cactus Ed Abbey—would have made abominable Boy Scouts, an observation that provides me genuine consolation.
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