In Homage to the Humble Shower
One of life's most under-rated pleasures
I was taking a shower today—hey, get that inappropriate image out of your mind, because I’m much more [attractive or alarming — choose one] than what you’re thinking—when I realized how profoundly I would miss it if I never had the opportunity to take a shower again.
Not even a power shower. I’m talking just your run-of-the-mill, everyday, water-comes-out-of-the-nozzle-like-you-expect-it-to shower.
Standing under a heated stream of water on a chilly day and washing your smell and cares away is, in my book, one of life’s vastly under-rated pleasures.
I know many people in the world never get the chance to take showers, and that many also don’t care for them. But for those of you that do, I want to offer an homage to an activity that we often take for granted—and definitely shouldn’t.
Here are three examples from my personal experience to convince you to fully appreciate and feel grateful for your everyday opportunity to indulge and luxuriate in a shower.
May these shower tragedies never befall you.
Where did all the water go?
Back in the olden days—the 1980s—I lived on a Pacific island for two years. This island got a phenomenal 200 inches of rain per year, or almost 7 times the mainland US (which gets about 30 inches).
There wasn’t a water supply system where I lived, but who needs it when you can use rainfall and gravity to have a perfectly nice shower every single day of the week—or any time you fancy taking one.
Of course, given my luck, and given the pervasiveness of Sod’s Law (UK) or Murphy’s Law (US) in the grand scheme of things, wouldn’t you know that a major drought hit the island my first year there.
I lived with a local family who were perfectly fine not taking a daily shower, and they never seemed to have any sort of repugnant odor either, but I hate to admit that I’m one of those people who reeks if I don’t take a shower, particularly in a tropical climate that makes you sweat.
As someone who also walked fast everywhere, I was sweating bucketloads under that intense equatorial sun. The locals knew to walk slowly and preserve their body fluids and salt, but I wasn’t wise to that. So my mainland, cold-climate behavior meant that I was both smelly and dehydrated.
I can stand my own stink for a matter of days (something I’m now prone to do working from home), but I’m not keen on imposing it on the people I work with. I had a government job, and putting on smelly clothes on a smelly body just seemed a step too far.
The rain didn’t fall off suddenly during that drought, but instead it became less and less day by day. When the shower stopped dispensing even a trickle, my family allowed me to take a half-bucket from the dribbling kitchen tap and use that to bathe myself.
Have you ever had to take a bucket bath? I learned how to wash my hair and body with only half a pail of water. I consider that a CV-worthy accomplishment, particularly if I want to apply for camp counsellor positions and survivor reality TV show gigs.
Eventually there was no water coming out of the tap at all and we went to a nearby river to bathe and do laundry. Of course, we weren’t the only people with this brilliant idea. Many families were there doing laundry and dishes in the depleted waters. You had to find a spot to call your own, and then you were prone to having other people’s dirty water flow into your little piece of the river.
Not to mention the appalling reality that the river was the home of fresh-water eels—nasty creatures with teeth angled backward so that if you tried to pull them off, you would end up ripping off a bunch of your own skin and leaving it in their mouths. A tasty meal for them no matter what you did.
And there was the further challenge that you had to bathe with your clothes on because the island had a strict dress code. Anyone could go topless, but no showing the area from your waist to your knees, the erogenous zone in that part of the world. If you wanted to change into a clean set of clothes, you had to go through contortions to replace one set of clothes with another under a towel or out in the open.
The whole experience was, obviously, unforgettable, and I picked up some unique new skill sets.
I don’t remember how long it took for the rains to return, but I do know that the drought was traumatic while it lasted because we didn’t have drinking and cooking water either. Bathing came to be beside the point in the quest to have water for the very basics in life.
That experience brought home to me just how essential water is to staying alive. If you don’t have water, you’re up a creek without a paddle (to use a water metaphor).
You’re also deprived of one of life’s greatest pleasures. You have no idea how ecstatic I was when the rains resumed and water poured out of the shower. Or how grateful I felt every time I soaped up and knew I wouldn’t have to splash water from a bucket, or dip in an eel-infested river with dirty water flowing from my neighbors upstream. Or change my clothes out in the open in front of the entire village and risk showing my erogenous and titillating knee zone.
As I said, a private shower—one of life’s vastly under-rated pleasures.
The world’s most ridiculous shower
Fast forward to the 2010s and I’m now living in England. London had become too expensive and I found a flat outside the city within a decent commute. I felt fortunate.
The only problem was that the flat had the most ridiculous bathtub-cum-shower you’ll ever see. (That’s not the bathtub in question below. It’s just a stock photo of a cute dog in a wraparound red doggie towel in a bathtub. I don’t want to get sued by the tub manufacturers for making fun of their bathtub. Hence a cute dog instead.)
The bathtub of which I’m writing was a compact sit-down model with a shower right over the seat part. Kind of like traveling in a railcar or on a rock ‘n roll tour bus where the shower rains down on the toilet. A couple in their 70s had lived—and recently died—in that flat, and obviously had this piece of kit put in when getting into and standing in a slippery bathtub became too dangerous for them.
The problem was that, if you were a shower person like I was, you had to put up a shower curtain to stop the showerhead from spraying water all over the bathroom floor, and the even bigger problem was that the bathroom floor was covered in wall-to-wall, non-waterproof carpet. If you didn’t want your bathroom reeking of mold and mildew (and making you ill), you had to master how to keep the water inside the environs of the bathtub.
I don’t know why, but carpet like this can be found across the United Kingdom. It seems to be an unfortunate trend that swept the country before everyone realised “Uh-oh, having carpet on your bathroom floor, and non-waterproof carpet at that, maybe isn’t such a brilliant idea.” But once it was installed and discovered wanting, I’m guessing that people didn’t have the money to replace it. They simply had to make do.
So I put up a shower curtain, but lo and behold, given poor placement of the shower rod, the curtain hung halfway into the tub and gave me a very small space in which to stand. Every time I moved I was bumping up against that goldarn shower curtain.
You’re probably wondering why I didn’t have the shower rod moved. Have you ever dealt with a British plumber? I couldn’t even get them to figure out why the water pump wasn’t working properly or the hot water tank was making a horrific noise. They have a habit of charging for a visit and then telling you the problem can’t be fixed. I don’t know what they teach in UK plumbing schools, but it doesn’t seem to be plumbing.
I was stuck with this joke of a bathtub-cum-shower for seven years. And I was tub-shamed every time I had guests and they insisted on taking pictures of themselves in the bathtub and putting these up on social media with embarrassing comments. Even guests from former Soviet countries where living standards used to be shite insisted on doing this. Even they couldn’t believe I was living with this absurdity.
But at least I could take a shower and get clean, uncomfortable though the shower was. But what happens when you have well water and the frickin’ tap keeps shutting off?
The on again, off again tap
You’d think water problems like these are foreign to the good ol’ US of A, but you’d be wrong. Let me explain the realities of life in 2023 America to you.
It’s hard to find a place to live—purchased or rented—in the area where I reside now. The occupancy availability rate for rental properties is an incredible 0.5%. That means that, for every 100 properties, there is only half a property available to a would-be renter. I had a retired guy who just sold his house in an upscale area tell me that he can’t find anywhere to rent, even with a lot of dollars in his pocket. He never expected to end up a rich homeless guy in the area where he’s lived for many years.
That’s why everyone is clinging to their current home—and their car. I recently had a car dealer tell me to hold on to my used car because models like mine (a ten-year-old Prius, f’crissakes) are impossible to find. My car has even gone up in value rather than depreciating, as cars used to do. Insane.
So is it a surprise, in this world gone mad, that serious things can go wrong with your living situation but you wouldn’t think of moving? In my case, the water from the faucet was mysteriously disappearing and then reappearing a while later. Something to do with the well and water pressure—in an area with a goodly amount of rain. Not even an area with a water shortage or a depleted water table.
At the same time as I was dealing with this, the well water pump in my brother’s house broke and he and his partner were looking at a $5,000+ bill to replace it. They were out of water for weeks as they got bids and searched for the best (read cheapest but acceptable) option.
Lucky for them that there is fountain fed by a mountain spring in their small town where they can get drinking and cooking water. But they had to visit other people’s houses to get themselves a shower. Like when my brother came to hang out and, at the end of his visit, pulled out a towel and asked if he could use my shower. Well, sure, but don’t be surprised if the tap stops working, I had to warn him. But go for it, bro. Knock yourself out. Enjoy.
You don’t know what you’ll crave until it’s gone
Circumstances such as these teach you new habits. I learned to keep bottles and containers of water around, and to take showers and do dishes when I have the opportunity.
I learned to revel in a shower when I get it, not to take that incredibly pleasurable heated stream of water for granted.
I learned to be grateful for a normal shower where the curtain doesn’t rub up against my back and annoy me no end and cause me to spew a stream of unmentionable expletives.
I learned to be grateful that I don’t have wall-to-wall, non-waterproof carpet in my bathroom that creates a burgeoning mold and mildew problem, and which threatens to send me for yet another round of doctors’ visits where I get misdiagnosed with some ludicrous ailment and have a $20,000 bill for testing and treatment.
I’m telling you, we need to be grateful for regular access to a shower that makes us forget all the crap we’re dealing with for a few glorious minutes as we indulge in its magical cleansing and healing powers.
For sure, we gotta get hip to the fact that the humble shower is, no argument or question, one of life’s hugely under-rated pleasures.