Have you ever been on a three-or four-hour journey or even say on a one-hour car trip with two or three kids? What is the first thing that you do when you get where you’re going? Are you by any chance over 70 with a bladder problem? What do you most frequently search for when you arrive?

Shifting gears for a moment here, I want to invite you to the village of tumbling waters aka Shelburne Falls. Shelburne Falls for the past 70 years has been a destination for travelers from all over the northeast and even the world beyond. Nobody seems to have a firm handle on the exact figure for tourists coming to the enchanted village between Memorial Day and the end of October, but let’s just say that it’s 15,000. Since most of those travelers come on weekends, we will say that as many as 326 visitors show up on a given Saturday or Sunday.

Despite its appetite for tourists, Shelburne Falls has not always been exactly potty friendly. Before 1990, three or four restaurants and a couple of stores were about the only places that you could count on being able to find and use a restroom, if you were a customer.

The 1990s brought the Great Potty Renaissance to the Falls with the opening of the Village Information Center and it’s splendid rest rooms. This was followed up by Buckland and Shelburne deciding to also make their town hall restrooms available to the public.

For those events requiring additional porcelain power, like the Iron Bridge Dinner, several porta potties were brought in to the village. You could safely say that by the end of 2019 Shelburne Falls had fully faced the problem and finally the Falls was truly a potty-friendly destination.

Well, here we are in July 2020. Life in Shelburne Falls as well as a good portion of the rest of the planet is dealing with a health crisis that has turned everything upside down. Any business that had previously offered public restrooms was shut down. The Village Information Center was shut down. The two town hall restrooms were closed off for visitors. By the end of April of this year, there were in fact no public restrooms available anymore in Shelburne Falls.

Sometime in June, as a result of a recent grant program, one porta potty was installed on the Buckland side and another on the Shelburne side. Unfortunately, a spate of trashing and grafitization in early July resulted in the Buckland porta potty being removed, leaving one very lonely porta potty in place on the Shelburne side of the Falls.

Just for a moment, imagine yourself as a traveler from afar being lucky enough to stumble upon that one and only solo porta potty in Shelburne Falls. Unfortunately you’re also unlucky enough to be the 326th visitor that day. As there is no daily attendant, what does this facility look like when you get there? When I close my eyes and imagine all this, I don’t get any warm comfy visions of divine cleanliness much less sufficient sanitization in keeping with the COVID times.

So what will people do when they have to go but have virtually little or no proper facility to go-to go??

Trust me, people when left to their own devices with no possible sanitary solutions available will seek other solutions. I leave the explanation of exactly what those unsanitary solutions might be to those folks who have found themselves from time to time experiencing similar uncomfortable situations.

And that my friends is the state of the human condition in Shelburne Falls in July 2020. Back to you Chet.

Anthony Jewell is a resident of Shelburne Falls.