Chapter 51: The Latrine

"From the moment you pulled out that chainsaw, I knew China's environment was doomed!" At the Third National Environmental Protection Conference, Dai Xie's speech would ignite a denunciation campaign against Minister of Forestry Wu Kuangming. Comrade Wu, who had served on the forestry front for over two decades, would be forced to deliver a profound self-criticism before quietly resigning to become president of Forestry University. But rewind thirty years to this day, and he was being lauded by the Executive Committee as "one man doing a whole team's quota"—a labor hero. Of course, his impressive output owed more to the pathetic performance of the other loggers than to the chainsaw itself.

There was more than one chainsaw, but nobody dared touch those limb-severing machines without proper training. Wu Kuangming crash-trained two volunteers and demonstrated the proper axe technique: circle the trunk with repeated swings, cutting deeper toward the heartwood with each pass. When the tree began to sway, position yourself on the uphill side, brace the axe against the trunk, and shout the warning. Down it goes. Simple enough to watch, but it demanded both arm strength and skill—far from easy. He chopped away while offering casual instruction to those around him.

The logging crews worked along the timber line, axes thudding and saws rasping in uneven rhythm. Occasionally someone shouted and a tree crashed earthward. For these former denizens of the modern world, felling timber proved grueling work. Most were hopeless amateurs—arms swinging hard but producing shallow cuts, saws constantly pinched or bound in the wood, every stroke exhausting. Half a day's labor couldn't bring down a single tree, yet they'd already worn through plenty of saws and axes. The Planning Committee's supply clerks watched with increasingly sour expressions.

Wu Kuangming worked alongside everyone with his chainsaw, though he wasn't truly professional either. The machine was heavy and required considerable force to keep stable while running. Each felled tree left him drenched in sweat.

Growing restless, he made his rounds to check on the various crews. Beneath a towering sea-lotus, he found Shao Zong and Hu Yicheng working a two-man saw, pushing and pulling with laborious effort. Even in the mild sunlight, both were panting like oxen. He reminded them, "Careful—don't snap the blade. The Planning Committee people are already giving us dirty looks."

Hu Yicheng sighed heavily. "This is despair! The Committee has no eyes! I'm supposed to be high-precision talent, and they've got me pulling a saw! If my classmates could see what I'm doing with my biology degree, they'd laugh themselves sick."

"Experts use finesse; amateurs just use muscle," Wu Kuangming said. "You'll learn as you go. Though I notice everyone keeps turning down the chainsaw."

"No thanks—I'd like my arms and legs to stay attached. I can't handle that thing."

"With my build, trying to be Leatherface would probably mean taking off my own body parts first." Shao Zong pulled the saw with a pained expression. "I thought joining Communications would be easy—personally build China Telecom. Instead, here I am prepping telephone poles."

Wu Kuangming was about to offer some encouragement when a scream pierced the air. "Yikes! Snake!" Before anyone could react, three or four people came scrambling out of the woods in wild terror, axes and saws scattered behind them.

He hurried to intercept the panicked group. Still shaken, they could barely speak coherently. Wu Kuangming felt nothing but contempt for these city homebodies—for real loggers, encountering snakes was routine. He'd heard stories from a friend who'd worked in forestry: sleeping at night in the forest, you always had to shake out your bedding. When autumn turned cold, snakes would creep into workers' shacks seeking warmth, and you'd have to smoke them out before you could sleep.

Mangrove marshes like this were obviously prime reptile territory—which was precisely why he'd issued tall rubber boots to all the loggers. Waterproofing was only a secondary benefit.

Liu Zheng's eyes lit up. He grabbed a forked stick from the pile of trimmed branches and told Wu Kuangming, "Boss, I'll go check it out. If I catch it, we'll have extra meat for dinner tonight."

"Didn't the Committee say no eating wildlife?"

"Who cares. Pure natural wild stuff like this—how can you not eat it?" Wildlife exploration was Liu Zheng's profession, and skinning an unlucky snake for dinner was routine business. He guessed they'd encountered common Guangdong species—water snakes, pit vipers—or possibly something more venomous like bamboo pit vipers or krait. Having caught plenty in his time and being well-equipped with several bottles of Jidesheng snake-bite medicine in his pack, he enthusiastically followed the escapees' trail into the brush. After circling around for a while, he found nothing. Worried his man had gone too deep and might get lost, Wu Kuangming called him back.

While Wu Kuangming was still calming the frightened transmigrators and delivering an impromptu safety lecture, the crack of breaking branches echoed through the trees, followed by a scream. They rushed toward the sound and found a man struck by a falling tree. The young worker lay bleeding from his face, moaning in pain while bystanders stood helplessly around him. Fortunately, Health Group personnel were patrolling the beach nearby. One call on the walkie-talkie and a yellow farm truck with a red cross came bouncing up. A quick assessment determined there was no major damage—just a laceration. They bandaged the wound, loaded him onto the truck, and sent him off.

The incident left Wu Kuangming deeply uneasy. He wasn't truly familiar with logging work himself, and this was his first time leading so many people through such dangerous labor. Since landing, his was the first work site to produce a casualty—not exactly a proud distinction. He lost all interest in working and spent the rest of the day carrying his chainsaw from crew to crew, checking on progress and reminding everyone about safety. When he found someone really struggling with a stubborn tree, he just solved it with the chainsaw.

Felled timber was dragged to the beach for trimming, while branches and leaves were piled for later use. Freshly cut wood contained too much moisture for immediate processing—using it right away would quickly lead to shrinkage, warping, even rot and pest infestation. Normally it needed adequate drying time or kiln treatment. The transmigrators had no drying equipment, but fortunately, permanence wasn't the goal. A few watchtowers and latrines were only temporary structures, so wet wood would have to suffice.

Dai Xie took a deep breath. The slightly salty sea breeze penetrated to his very core. The seawater here wasn't so different from his own era—perhaps because the ocean, as the cradle of life, possessed a self-cleaning power far exceeding that of rivers that couldn't tolerate industrial pollution.

Perhaps fate really had intervened—how else could he explain an ordinary office worker joining such a heaven-defying plan? He'd left without even a proper farewell letter, choosing silent departure to spare his family worry. Yet to so lightly sever over twenty years of family bonds—on reflection, it seemed almost heartless. But what was done was done; there was no turning back now. The moment he'd watched that thin mirror-like surface transform into white light and vanish, Dai Xie understood: from that point forward, everything from the old world was abandoned. All that remained for him and his comrades was a single resolve—"Build a New World."

Due to his physique and nearsightedness, combined with his previous career, Dai Xie had always been assigned to statistics and calculations. His knowledge of strategic planning had earned him a spot on the Planning Committee, where his duties included managing each group's materials and tools, distributing supplies, and meticulously tracking resource use and consumption. Since all modern tools and supplies were irreplaceable after the crossing, managing these precious resources was the Committee's primary concern. They also handled the intake and redistribution of locally gathered and manufactured materials—busy work, to say the least.

At the moment, his task was using a handheld PDA to track logging quantities and timber destinations. Watching Wu Kuangming grin with wicked satisfaction as he wielded the chainsaw, watching trees large and small crash into the muddy water while startled waterbirds squawked and fled... Done for—with this killing weapon in hand, China's environment has no future. He closed his eyes in pain.

"Timber!" Wu Kuangming's trademark shriek jolted Dai Xie from his environmental brooding. He immediately executed a ground roll, covering several feet and barely dodging the tree that came thundering down beside him—nearly becoming the expedition's first fatality.

"What the hell! You did that on purpose!" Dai Xie roared at Wu Kuangming, now covered head to toe in muddy water.

"Bro, I don't even have a sister..." Wu Kuangming gazed at Xiao Dai with an expression of wounded innocence. Thus was their first grudge established.

Zhuo Tianmin had stubbornly waited by the logging site until he finally secured first claim on the lumber. Then the Building Group identified a solid foundation near the beach and began digging. Tian Jiujiu's specialty was drainage engineering, so constructing latrines for the transmigrators became his first official assignment. Latrines were crucial for camp sanitation—more important, even, than the cafeteria.

For a professional water-supply-and-drainage engineer, building a simple latrine wasn't particularly complicated. Tian Jiujiu had all manner of plans at his disposal. The problem was that they had no bricks, no cement, not even mud bricks. Only a limited supply of lumber was available.

His original design was elegantly simple: build a platform over a tidal channel at the beach's edge, lay planks on top with gaps between them, and screen the sides with branches and leaves. Waste would drop directly into the sea—convenient and sanitary. Certain environmentalists and the Agriculture Group had strenuously objected. The environmentalists cited pollution concerns; Agriculture still hoped to use this material as fertilizer. Tian Jiujiu now understood Wu Nanhai's peculiar stinginess about such matters. When Wu discussed this particular resource, his expression took on a fanatical gleam, as if he were talking about gold and silver.

The Committee had obviously been swayed by Wu's impassioned speech. The latrine plan was revised to a pit-style design. A simple pit latrine would work fine—planks laid over a hole, similar in principle to his over-water concept. But such pit latrines typically didn't account for waste recovery; when they filled, you simply sprinkled lime and buried the whole thing. For waste recovery, pit latrines required manual emptying.

"Since Agriculture loves this stuff so much, let them handle the emptying," Tian Jiujiu grumbled. The pit latrine's biggest drawback was the sheer volume of earthwork required.

For nearly six hundred users, calculating one stall for every fifty to sixty people, the men's side would need ten stalls plus a urinal trough; the women's side would need two. The pits would be long and narrow with sloped bottoms so waste would flow toward collection pits. These collection pits sat outside the latrine structure, covered with wooden lids for easy emptying access. Ideally, pit bottoms and walls should be cement-plastered or at least brick-lined to prevent waste from seeping into the groundwater. But they had no such materials; they could only compact the earth with tamping machines. Fortunately, the local groundwater was too salty to drink anyway—a little contamination wouldn't matter.

After deploying an excavator and several "basic labor" teams, the pits were finally dug. With no bricks available, they used tree trunks for the pit edges, packed tight with dirt. With no stall planks, they bound trimmed branches together with vines to create makeshift rafts as substitutes. The side frames went up, but again, there were no bricks for walls. So they resorted to old methods: bury spaced poles vertically in the ground, then weave vines back and forth between them, inserting many small branches to create a wattle framework. Finally, they piled sticky mud mixed with leaves and grass onto this framework and smoothed both sides with trowels. Apart from the bumpy surfaces, it looked decent enough. Tian Jiujiu knew perfectly well that all these undried materials would cause problems after a few days baking in the sun.

(End of Chapter)