Jaimie's excellent description of using a macerator reminded me of how not to use one. When we were all pretty new on the road, a bunch of us were boondocking in Ajo, Ariz., south of Gila Bend. We were on dispersed land where you could dump if you dug a hole (well not quite that simple, but we were not doing anything illegal). We were all camped far enough away from each other so we felt we were totally alone. except we were close enough to get together to do stuff.
One late afternoon, we decided to have a big pot luck, located that time in front of our old 21.5-foot fifth wheel. We did the usual: set up a few tables, spread out the food, sat together in clumps to chat, mostly women with women and men with each other. Suddenly there was activity from one of the men's groups. Apparently my husband had shared that we needed to dump the black tank but didn't want to hook up to go to town. "Does anyone have a blue boy I could borrow?" he must have asked.
"No, but I have a new macerator pump I've been wanting to try out," one of the men said. All of a sudden, we women noticed all the men had left their chairs and gone to the back of the rig. Hmmm. We kept talking. We got up after we heard the screaming and yelling. Rather than dig the hole that was required, they decided to use the gopher holes and tunnels that were in place under ground.
The problem was that they hadn't carefully secured the macerator pump to the sewer nozzle. They also discovered the hose was too narrow. Okay. They closed the lever on the sewer nozzle and regrouped. Now they read the directions, got a better hose, and started again. This time it worked well. Unfortunately the gopher holes and tunnels were too shallow to hold the matter. I could just see the poor gophers lying flat on the ground, paws up, gasping for air.
In the true spirit of RVing, everybody helped clean up the mess. One of the strengths of RVing is how easy it is to get close to each other. But this was a bit too close for me!
One of the ironies of this situation is that years later another group of us were boondocking near Arches NP in Utah. The women decided to have a night out so we could talk "girl talk." We went to see a chick flick in town (First Wives Club) followed by dinner out. I was sitting across the table from one of the women who had been at the Macerator Massacre. We started laughing about it and then shared the whole story with the others. Suddenly we realized that even on our night out without the guys, we still couldn't get away from talking about black tanks! It's the RVers' curse.
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