When All Hell Breaks Loose (60 page)

T
he following are tips to help keep your family reasonably clean when conventional means for doing so have disappeared. Attempting to continue regular hygiene habits will help prevent the spread of disease, increase morale, and offer a predictable routine, thereby reducing stress.

The Amazing Towel Bath:
Four Simple Steps to a Cleaner You and a Better Attitude

Let's face it, life sucks with a smelly crotch and armpits. Eating the can of survival beans next to Uncle Ted's wafting pelt can be a trying experience for the wee ones as well as the older members of the family. I remember my grandmother (one of seven kids) cringing as she told me the story about her bathing experiences on the old South Dakota homestead. Once a week her mother would fill a washtub with water heated on the woodstove. Then, one by one, the entire family would take turns bathing in the same water. The littlest kids went first, often peeing in the water. On the bright side, maybe it kept the water warmer longer.

It's amazing how a somewhat clean body can have a positive effect on your attitude. If survival situations become long term and really grubby, "cooties" can get out of control and offer up a number of skin infections that are no fun to deal with. Crowded shelters, especially during hot, humid weather, can cause skin diseases to flourish. It's very important to wash off sweat and dead skin cells from your body. In sticky, humid weather, these skin cells will stay on your body and start to decay. At the same time, bathing with soap too often washes off normal skin oils and can cause the skin to prematurely dry out and crack, especially in dry, cold environments.

While emergency scenarios can put a damper on supplies, especially hot water, with a little ingenuity, your family can feel like half a million bucks with minimal effort. In the past, my solar shower experiences have been more of an experiment than a shower during the winter months. Thus I have become well-versed in perfecting the towel or sponge bath, as some prefer to call it.

The following recipe for cleanliness is good for one adult.

Ingredients:

Heat source to boil water

Medium-sized pot or container

One-half quart, give or take, of potable or nonpotable water

One medium-sized hand towel, large kitchen towel, large clean shirt, or whatever

Your naked, smelly body

Directions:

1
Put water in pot, cover with lid, and begin to bring to boil on heat source. Using a lid will save fuel, time, and water.

2
Check frequently. As water starts to steam and form small bubbles at bottom of pot, remove pot from heat source. (
^*
see Tried and True Towel Tips below.)

3
Slowly and carefully immerse towel into pot. Move towel around slightly to let capillary action of cloth wick up hot water. If towel is completely saturated, use less water next time as a fully wet towel will be too hot to pick up, let alone wring out, and it will drip all over the place.

4
When towel is very hot but not too hot to handle (
^**
see Tried and True Towel Tips), pick up towel and vigorously wash body.

I like to start with my face (washing long hair is a separate event, folks), and then my arms and torso, back, legs, armpits, and the crotch last. I use every part of the towel, front and back, being careful not to rework the crotch part of the towel over some other part of my body. Believe it or not, I then take the towel, crotch part folded in the middle, and spot mop the floor of my house. While this may seem extreme to many water-rich parts of the country, I can sense my fellow desert rats and rain harvesters nodding in approval. Regardless of your mopping the floor with your towel or not, the towel is now dirty and should be laundered or at least sun-washed before future use (
^***
see Tried and True Towel Tips).

Tried and True Towel Tips:

^*
Fully boiling the water will make it too hot for immediate use, but if you're bathing with funky, nonpotable water, you may choose to boil the water for one minute or at least bring it to a boil to ensure the destruction of weird, waterborne pathogens.

^**
The towel will transform from being too hot to handle to cool within a phenomenally short amount of time so move with speed!

^***
The more you encourage your loved ones, especially the kiddies, to wipe and clean their butt cracks with something disposable
before
wiping it with the towel, the easier it will be to clean the towel for future use and make certain that it's properly disinfected. Washcloths, underwear, socks, and other high-use items can be disinfected by putting them into boiling water for a minute or two. Disinfecting these items, not just washing them, is the most important health objective under difficult shelter conditions. Unless plenty of water is available for rinsing, don't disinfect clothing by putting it in a chlorine bleach solution. Also, see the sun-washing section later in this chapter.

Spiffy Spray Bottle Showers

Spray bottles can be made into improvised showers allowing you to use very small amounts of water for bathing. Many household goods come in a spray bottle or they can be purchased new at most hardware stores. If you choose to recycle a spray bottle for use as a shower, don't choose one that held bug poison or some other toxic goo. Clean and rinse out the bottle thoroughly. Most spray bottles have an adjustable spout that will let you choose from a fine mist to a squirt-gunlike stream depending upon your needs. Fill up your bottle with warm water or set it in the sun. Bottles can be painted a dark color to speed up the absorption of shortwave radiation from the sun to heat up the water, but the smaller size of most bottles usually makes this unnecessary. Next, get naked, and in an appropriate place, use a combination of spraying and wiping with a rag or small towel to get clean.

The Super-Sized Spray Bottle Shower

Multigallon capacity, manually pressurized spray bottles with an attached handheld wand that are normally used for spraying weed killer or fertilizers can be purchased at hardware stores. As the majority of my house is concrete, I used one of these sprayers (and the smaller handheld spray bottles) to paint my house using concrete dye. Just like their little brothers, these big brother spray bottles can be painted black or some other dark color, filled with water, and set in the sun to get hot, or at least warm, depending on where you live and the season. The container holding the water has a pump that allows you to pressurize the water inside, eliminating the need to continually pump the handle for you to have a pressurized shower. Simply fill the clean container with warm/hot water or set it in the sun, pressurize the holding tank, and enjoy a serious spray of water. The handheld wand can be modified and mounted in a number of ways to offer hands-free operation.
Chemical Caution:
Don't use a sprayer that has held toxic weed killer or chemical fertilizers for extended periods of time. Plastic absorbs the contents of whatever is stored within it so even intense scrubbing may not be enough to clean a sprayer that has been used for these purposes. Use common sense and test such a sprayer on something other than your crotch.

Greasy Hair

To temporarily clean greasy hair, try rubbing small amounts of baby powder into the scalp and hair. Any extra should be brushed or combed out. Visually, this method works best for blondes, as dark-haired people might look like they have a wicked case of dandruff—but who cares if you're more comfortable. Baby powder is a cover-up and doesn't deal with the cause of greasy hair, but it helps to stretch out the time between rare showers, if need be.