Camping For Boys | Page 9

garbage
or refuse.
Do not throw dirty dish water promiscuously upon the ground. Dig a
trench and put the water in this trench. Sprinkle chloride of lime or a
disinfectant upon it each day. In a permanent camp a waste water well
should be dug and lined with stone. The drain pipe should be laid from
the kitchen to the well. This water soon disappears in the soil and does
not become a nuisance. Make sure that the well is not in line with the
water supply of the camp. A little potash or some washing soda
dissolved in the sink will help to keep the drain clean.
Place barrels in different parts of the camp for refuse and scraps. A coat
of whitewash or white paint will make them conspicuous. In one camp
the following suggestive bit of verse was painted on the waste barrels:
Ravenous Barrel

I am all mouth and vacuum I never get enough, So cram me full of fruit
peels, Old papers, trash and stuff.
Epicurean Barrel
O, how sorry I feel for a boy Who litters clean places with trash, Who
throws away papers and fruit peels Which form my favorite hash.
Waste Barrels
These barrels should be set upon two strips of wood placed parallel.
This permits the air to pass beneath the barrel and keeps its bottom
from decaying by contact with the ground. The barrels should be
emptied daily and the trash burned.
A dirty, carelessly kept, untidy camp will make discipline and order
very difficult to attain and the influence will soon be noticed in the
careless personal habits of the boys. There is an educational and moral
value in cleanliness which is second only to that of good health.
Water Supply
Dr. Charles E. A. Winslow, the noted biologist, is authority for the
following statement; [Camp Conference, p.61] "The source of danger
in water is always human or animal pollution. Occasionally we find
water which is bad to drink on account of minerals dissolved on its way
through the ground or on account of passage through lead pipes, but the
danger is never from ordinary decomposing vegetable matter. If you
have to choose between a bright, clear stream which may be polluted at
some point above, and a pond full of dead leaves and peaty matter, but
which you can inspect all around and find free from contamination,
choose the pond. Even in the woods it is not easy to find surface waters
that are surely protected, and streams particularly are dangerous
sources of water supply. We have now got rid of the idea that running
water purifies itself. It is standing water which purifies itself, if
anything, for in stagnation there is much more chance for the disease
germs to die out. Better than either a pond or stream, unless you can
carry out a rather careful exploration of their surroundings, is ground

water from a well or spring; though that again is not necessarily safe. If
the well is in good sandy soil with no cracks or fissures, even water that
has been polluted may be well purified and made safe to drink. In a
clayey or rocky region, on the other hand, contaminating material may
travel for considerable distance under ground. Even if your well is
protected below, a very important point to look after is the pollution
from the surface. I believe more cases of typhoid fever from wells are
due to surface pollution than to the character of the water itself. This is
a danger which can, of course, be done away with by protection of the
well from surface drainage, by seeing that the surface wash is not
allowed to drain toward it and that it is protected by a tight covering
from the entrance of its own waste water. If good water cannot be
secured in any of these ways, the water must be purified. It has been
said that what we desire in water supply is innocence and not
repentance; but if you cannot get pristine innocence, you can, at least,
secure works meet for repentance and make the water safe, by filtering
through either a Pasteur or a Berkefeld filter--either of those filters will
take out bacteria, while no other filters that I know of will or by various
chemical disinfectants, not any of them very satisfactory--or, best of all,
by boiling, which will surely destroy all disease germs."
Indians had a way of purifying water from a pond or swamp by digging
a hole about one foot across and down about six inches below the water
level, a few feet from the pond. After it had filled with water, they
bailed it out quickly, repeating the bailing process about three times.
After the third bailing the hole would fill with filtered