In Praise of the Porch Bath

or: one thing we can control is how hard we try

Preorders are up now for a new book called Orso: Wartime Journals of an Anarchist, and I’m proud of the small part I played in making this book happen. An Italian anarchist named Lorenzo Orsetti died fighting on the frontlines against Isis in Rojava a few years back, and his comrades got his journals out to Italy. The publisher there reached out to us here with an English translation, and we put together a pretty good edition.

This week’s Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff episodes are about Bread & Puppet, the people who brought us the concept of having giant, dramatic puppets at protests.

And my latest books are The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice and The Defender’s Almanac.

In Praise of the Porch Bath

A few nights ago, I lay in a bathtub on my porch and watched lightning across the mountains, far enough away that I couldn’t hear the thunder, far enough away that I felt safe. Rain fell on me lightly. Some bug the size of a luna moth flew around me, furiously beating its wings, and my dog kept it away from me. Not everything in my life was perfect that night (and some very specific, very major political things are so far from perfect that they can easily keep me up at night in fear), but it was perfect enough.

With no neighbors in sight, it’s easy to be naked outside. The porch bath might be the perfect encapsulation of what I love about living in the country, and even the giant unknowable bugs couldn’t keep me from enjoying myself.

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I spent about four years in search of a porch bath.

See, when 2020 hit, I lived alone in a cabin in the woods (I’ve probably told you this before) and I spent several months scrambling to plumb a sink and a porch shower so I could wash my dishes and my body, all the while I calmly, patiently, lost my mind a little bit from isolation.

All of March, I showered with one of those solar hot water shower bags, which meant bathing in the shade in 85 degree water in 45 degree air. I’ve spent long enough living outside that I know that getting hot(tish) water and soap onto my body isn’t a luxury but a necessity. Fungal infections are no joke, and they’re easy to acquire without running water.