Combatting the Drought: It Could Prove a Real Turnoff

As the drought goes on, and many of us face fines for excessive use of water, we must think of more ways to save it.

I have already suggested a method that is accessible only to males and that is unavailable to those who do not have yards.

I must say, however, that I have received letters from several readers who say they have found it very successful and horticulturally productive.

An even greater saving, I suggest, can be made by restrictions on our methods of personal bathing. Our culture requires most of us to be squeaky clean when we start the day, so avoiding the bath altogether is out of the question.

Most of us are familiar with the Navy bath, which was practiced, on captain’s orders, by every sailor in World War II. In the Navy bath one turns on the shower only long enough to get wet. Then one turns it off while one soaps. Then one turns it on only long enough to rinse off. Lingering under the hot water for the comfort of it is forbidden.

My wife tells me she is using the Navy bath. Certainly it is not available to men only, like my garden plan. It seems to me, though, that if one of us uses one plan and the other uses the other, that is enough of a contribution by one household. I still leave the water running while I soap.

We are also saving water by means of a new toilet that neither of us wanted. When we remodeled our house recently our plans called for a new toilet in our new bathroom. It was to be a standard toilet, and our plan was approved by the Los Angeles Building and Safety Commission. However, when the job was finished--eight months later--the inspector would not pass the toilet. She said it had to be one that used about half as much water. Our argument that our plan had already been approved was brushed aside. We had to replace our brand new toilet.

So we have an almost new toilet in the garage which we will sell cheap to anyone who dares to bootleg it or who lives outside the jurisdiction of our building and safety department.

I am told that we can buy shower heads that save water, but we are trying to get by with our old ones. I am conditioned to bathe every day, but lately, if I am not going out, I skip my daily shower.

Actually, not bathing is very common in the movies. As a fan of Westerns, I have always wondered how the principals could stand one another when they took so few baths. We are all familiar with the Saturday-night bath in a free-standing tub in the frontier hotel room. Very often the female lead is visited by the male lead while she is soaking in suds up to her shoulders, or just below.

But obviously that Saturday-night bath is a special event. By Friday, I should think, it would be well overdue.

When the story calls for the principals to be trudging across the prairie or through the wilderness, the possibility of even a Saturday-night bath seems unlikely. Now and then the party comes to a river, into which they all plunge, fully dressed, in an orgy of bathing.

However long it may be between baths, however, the ardor of our hero and heroine for each other does not languish.

In “Unconquered,” for example, Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard engage in passionate clinches despite the fact that both, having pushed through the forest for days, were probably ripe.

Historically, bathing has not always enjoyed favor; it has actually been prohibited.

In “Cleanliness Has Only Recently Become a Virtue” (Smithsonian, February, 1991) Jay Stuller notes that Colonial America regarded bathing as impure, since it required nudity, which led to promiscuity. Laws in Pennsylvania and Virginia proscribed or limited bathing. For a time in Philadelphia, anyone who bathed more than once a month could be sent to jail.

Stuller quotes V. W. Greene, an Israeli epidemiologist, as observing that some supposedly backward societies were more given to bathing than more advanced societies. “The Polynesians, for example, were far cleaner than the European explorers who landed on their islands.”

Throughout much of the 19th Century, Greene says, Europeans and Americans lived in wretched filth, and consequently many died young. Uncleanliness led to an extremely high infant mortality rate.

We certainly don’t want to regress to 19th-Century standards. I doubt that even Paulette Goddard would be desirable if she hadn’t bathed for a month. But our society is becoming more restrictive. (Note the “politically correct” movement on our campuses.) If water becomes dangerously short, it is not impossible that we could be restrained from taking baths.

I guess I’d better turn the shower off when I soap.