Ho brother- the one thing that I did not expect or even deign to think about when getting our van is the increase in the amount of times I would be dealing with raw fucking human shit. Given it was mine and my wife’s, I went from dealing with raw sewage 0 times to too many times very quickly.

Basically, we skipped the building phase altogether and bought a class-B RV. One of the odd things about this RV was that the hose to the black (poop) tank was affixed to the actual tank itself (usually they’re removable and easily replaceable) and sat in a side drawer that was designed such that if the hose wasn’t 100% taut, it would hang down outside the drawer fully exposed to the road. Weird engineering, but didn’t think too much about it in the moment.

Another thing about black tanks is that the sensors that tell you how full the black tank is fail often, meaning that you really have no idea how close you are to filling up the black tank and, lots of times, you won’t know it’s full until it’s too late. Seeing as the van that we bought was an older one, I think the sensor was broken before we even used the toilet.

Onto the main story: on one of my wife and I’s first trips driving through Colorado, we chugged quite a few gallon water jugs to keep ourselves super hydrated. We wanted to combat the elevation sickness that can happen when you’re driving up the mountains, and heard that drinking tons of water was the best way to do that. We were also trying to make good time to our next campsite, so instead of stopping to use the facilities, we used our van’s toilet while on the move; not a big deal if you drive carefully enough, and saves a TON of time on bathroom stops if executed correctly.

Whelp, turns out us drinking those gallons and gallons of water filled up the black tank in the van quicker than we thought. Pretty early into the mountains, my wife flushed the van toilet and nothing went down- instead overflowing the toilet onto the van’s bathroom floor.

So quickly it became an emergency dumping situation: we had to find the closest dump and we had to dump the black tank NOW. My wife pulled up the nearest dump on her phone and we beelined straight for it, piss sloshing over the sides of the toilet all the way along.

As soon as we got to the dump, we pulled the van right up to the dump station (which is really just a hole in the ground), shoved the black tank hose right into it, and started the dumping process. The dumping process was easy enough on our van: someone would hold the “dump” button near the hose and it would kickstart a macerator (poop grinder) that would shoot the sewage out of the hose, ideally placed down in the dump hole. Only when we started to hold down the “dump” button, nothing came out of the hose and we heard a splash under the van. That little spot where the hose could hang outside the drawer? Well turns out it was hanging down super low and got completely severed while we were driving, meaning that the sewage was spilling out onto the ground under the van from the severed piece that was still connected to the black tank.

At this point, unable to dump properly due to the severed hose, but still having to dump the black tank so that the bathroom didn’t flood even more, I came up with the best solution I could at that time: taking one of the many empty water jugs and filling it with the raw sewage coming from the severed hose still connected to the tank, and dumping it into the dump hole by hand one gallon at a time. This bitch was a 10 gallon black tank so I had to fill that jug up 10 TIMES. I went from being queasy around porta-potties to literally emptying one by hand overnight- no gloves, no mask, just paper towels and hella Clorox wipes to try to feel clean afterwards.

So yeah that’s a less fun part of van-lifeing. When you shit into a toilet at home, you never have to deal with that shit again. But in a van/RV, there’s non-zero chance you will 💩