Kathleen Meyer is the author of the bestselling outdoor guide How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art, widely embraced by the outdoor community, with more than three million copies sold, in eight languages, and now in audio book. Its recent 4th edition is blessed with a foreword by Bill McKibben. Long the outdoor adventurer and nontraditional spirit, Kathleen, early on, chose—over housework—a life of rowing big rapids and driving draft horses cross-country, viewing the landscape from an inflatable raft or the seat of a hundred-year-old wagon. Her Rocky Mountain memoir Barefoot Hearted: A Wild Life Among Wildlife was published by Villard/Random House in 2001. (This book’s great misfortune was landing in the world five days before 9/11, her first reading the night before. You can still buy a discounted hardcover—directly from her and signed!—on the To Order page of this website.)
Born in Manhattan, the only child of a scientist and a librarian, Kathleen was raised on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. A water baby by nature, she acquired a passion as early as seven for racing catboat-class sailboats, Woodpussies. It all began near the New Jersey shore, on a mile-long peninsula jutting into the Shrewsbury River. The small neighborhood consisted of families from widely varied incomes—a diamond miner at one end, the Secretary of Labor at the other, and then there was Kathleen madly mowing expansive lawns to pay for her annual fifteen-dollar sailing club membership. She crewed every summer into her teens on the boats of more affluent neighbors. Later in life, in California, at a time when she worked with troubled adolescents, she succumbed to purchasing a stray New Jersey Woodpussy—the one she’d never had in her youth—and soon set sail into the unpredictable currents of San Francisco Bay. Forever the purist (in this case, no motor), her first day out found her, with a handsome male acquaintance on board, becalmed and drifting with the tide into both the dark of night and the Richmond freighter channel—no lights on her boat, no flashlight to shine on the sail. Trapped for those long hours of terror in the open cockpit of a thirteen-foot boat, she remembers it now as the first time she needed to know how, on earth, to finesse bodily excretions with adroit elegance.
When a sophomore in high school, Kathleen moved with her parents, in an abrupt relocation across the country, to sprawling Los Angeles—a change that would leave an indelible mark on her sensibilities and, as yet unimagined, career as a writer. College years took her north to the Bay Area: Berkeley, San Francisco, and finally towns in Marin County, where she dallied for twenty-three years. She led wilderness trips for inner-city youth, and then, with a woman named Susan, started up a drywall taping company they dubbed (in lieu of the suggested Mud Hens) O’ Holy Mud. They became renown for ten years as “the women” in the trades—taping, among other places, the Grateful Dead’s office digs, the room where Star Wars was written, and Melvin Belli’s San Francisco penthouse.
And yet, Kathleen’s days remained full of the open air. She guided whitewater rafting trips all over the western U.S. and Canada and rolled across three Rocky Mountain states by horse and wagon. Her writing life first sprang from her river trips, in an era when backcountry regulations that required the use of portable toilets and the practice of packing-it-out (human waste) were just getting started. She aimed to ease the embarrassment and awkwardness that city folks faced in trying to squat in the wild, as well as to save favorite beaches from assaults of soiled diapers and toilet paper, and to protect mountain streams from fecal pollution. Her instructive guidebook, How to Shit in the Woods, grew from a collection of graceless, laughable worst-ordeal stories, many of them her own. With her second edition and its Japanese translation, she was invited to be the keynote speaker at The International Toilet Symposium & Expo 1996: “Toilets and the Environment.”
It was the author’s final relocation, from California to the rural town of Victor, Montana, that supplied the grist for Barefoot Hearted. She likes to describe the move as “running away with the circus”—after meeting a rakish actor and horseshoer, a member of the Caravan Stage Company, a Canadian theater troupe, touring by means of thirteen Clydesdales and five brightly painted gypsy wagons. Garbed in her white painters’ overalls, well-splattered with drywall mud, she had stopped to snag a midday sandwich at the Belli Deli in San Rafael, when she spied an antique medicine wagon and two huge feathery-footed horses—the tent-theater’s promotional act—parked across the street. A tall Irishman’s unwinding from under one of the sturdy drafts sparked the meeting that lead to journeys by team and wagon and, eventually, to setting up marginal housekeeping in a seventy-five-year-old dairy barn, inhabited by an assortment of wild critters. Barefoot Hearted is the tale of this adventurous Western living, reflected poignantly against the author’s ponderings on the increasingly harried and threatened survival of wildlife as small towns everywhere go to sprawl.
Kathleen has been an environmental activist now for fifty years, focusing on water politics, issues of urban sprawl, and climate crisis. She was the founding editor of Headwaters, the Friends of the River newsletter. For many years, she served on the board of Environmental Traveling Companions, an NPO offering wilderness trips to inner-city youth and special needs people. Currently, she’s on the board of West Coast Rivers Alliance, a group of conservation leaders from the western and northern United States and Canada, advocating on behalf of rivers, fisheries, and watersheds in jeopardy throughout North America. Kathleen’s travel essays have been included in the Travelers’ Tales anthologies A Woman’s Passion for Travel: More True Stories from a Woman’s World and Sand in My Bra: Funny Women Write from the Road. Her writing and photographs have also appeared in the Professional Farrier and Anvil Magazine.
Kathleen makes her home with Patrick McCarron in an old, rather unrestored (read primitive), big red dairy barn in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. The horses have all departed for the happy hunting grounds but the bats, skunks, marmots, mice, flies, and one hilarious cat remain our roommates—along with the new overactive, barn-invading clouds of stinky, migrating-north-with-climate-change, boxelder bugs. Yuk!
Born in Manhattan, the only child of a scientist and a librarian, Kathleen was raised on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. A water baby by nature, she acquired a passion as early as seven for racing catboat-class sailboats, Woodpussies. It all began near the New Jersey shore, on a mile-long peninsula jutting into the Shrewsbury River. The small neighborhood consisted of families from widely varied incomes—a diamond miner at one end, the Secretary of Labor at the other, and then there was Kathleen madly mowing expansive lawns to pay for her annual fifteen-dollar sailing club membership. She crewed every summer into her teens on the boats of more affluent neighbors. Later in life, in California, at a time when she worked with troubled adolescents, she succumbed to purchasing a stray New Jersey Woodpussy—the one she’d never had in her youth—and soon set sail into the unpredictable currents of San Francisco Bay. Forever the purist (in this case, no motor), her first day out found her, with a handsome male acquaintance on board, becalmed and drifting with the tide into both the dark of night and the Richmond freighter channel—no lights on her boat, no flashlight to shine on the sail. Trapped for those long hours of terror in the open cockpit of a thirteen-foot boat, she remembers it now as the first time she needed to know how, on earth, to finesse bodily excretions with adroit elegance.
When a sophomore in high school, Kathleen moved with her parents, in an abrupt relocation across the country, to sprawling Los Angeles—a change that would leave an indelible mark on her sensibilities and, as yet unimagined, career as a writer. College years took her north to the Bay Area: Berkeley, San Francisco, and finally towns in Marin County, where she dallied for twenty-three years. She led wilderness trips for inner-city youth, and then, with a woman named Susan, started up a drywall taping company they dubbed (in lieu of the suggested Mud Hens) O’ Holy Mud. They became renown for ten years as “the women” in the trades—taping, among other places, the Grateful Dead’s office digs, the room where Star Wars was written, and Melvin Belli’s San Francisco penthouse.
And yet, Kathleen’s days remained full of the open air. She guided whitewater rafting trips all over the western U.S. and Canada and rolled across three Rocky Mountain states by horse and wagon. Her writing life first sprang from her river trips, in an era when backcountry regulations that required the use of portable toilets and the practice of packing-it-out (human waste) were just getting started. She aimed to ease the embarrassment and awkwardness that city folks faced in trying to squat in the wild, as well as to save favorite beaches from assaults of soiled diapers and toilet paper, and to protect mountain streams from fecal pollution. Her instructive guidebook, How to Shit in the Woods, grew from a collection of graceless, laughable worst-ordeal stories, many of them her own. With her second edition and its Japanese translation, she was invited to be the keynote speaker at The International Toilet Symposium & Expo 1996: “Toilets and the Environment.”
It was the author’s final relocation, from California to the rural town of Victor, Montana, that supplied the grist for Barefoot Hearted. She likes to describe the move as “running away with the circus”—after meeting a rakish actor and horseshoer, a member of the Caravan Stage Company, a Canadian theater troupe, touring by means of thirteen Clydesdales and five brightly painted gypsy wagons. Garbed in her white painters’ overalls, well-splattered with drywall mud, she had stopped to snag a midday sandwich at the Belli Deli in San Rafael, when she spied an antique medicine wagon and two huge feathery-footed horses—the tent-theater’s promotional act—parked across the street. A tall Irishman’s unwinding from under one of the sturdy drafts sparked the meeting that lead to journeys by team and wagon and, eventually, to setting up marginal housekeeping in a seventy-five-year-old dairy barn, inhabited by an assortment of wild critters. Barefoot Hearted is the tale of this adventurous Western living, reflected poignantly against the author’s ponderings on the increasingly harried and threatened survival of wildlife as small towns everywhere go to sprawl.
Kathleen has been an environmental activist now for fifty years, focusing on water politics, issues of urban sprawl, and climate crisis. She was the founding editor of Headwaters, the Friends of the River newsletter. For many years, she served on the board of Environmental Traveling Companions, an NPO offering wilderness trips to inner-city youth and special needs people. Currently, she’s on the board of West Coast Rivers Alliance, a group of conservation leaders from the western and northern United States and Canada, advocating on behalf of rivers, fisheries, and watersheds in jeopardy throughout North America. Kathleen’s travel essays have been included in the Travelers’ Tales anthologies A Woman’s Passion for Travel: More True Stories from a Woman’s World and Sand in My Bra: Funny Women Write from the Road. Her writing and photographs have also appeared in the Professional Farrier and Anvil Magazine.
Kathleen makes her home with Patrick McCarron in an old, rather unrestored (read primitive), big red dairy barn in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. The horses have all departed for the happy hunting grounds but the bats, skunks, marmots, mice, flies, and one hilarious cat remain our roommates—along with the new overactive, barn-invading clouds of stinky, migrating-north-with-climate-change, boxelder bugs. Yuk!
• • •
Morning Journal
Wyoming Centennial Wagon Train, 1990
Photographer Unknown
Kathleen in the Redwoods, 1989
Courtesy of San Francisco Examiner
Photo by Carolyn Cole
Home Sweet Home
Paco and Patrick sorting
sweetgrass for braiding . . .
Kathleen Meyer is the author of the bestselling outdoor guide How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art, widely embraced by the outdoor community, with more than three million copies sold, in eight languages, and now in audio book. Its recent 4th edition is blessed with a foreword by Bill McKibben. Long the outdoor adventurer and nontraditional spirit, Kathleen, early on, chose—over housework—a life of rowing big rapids and driving draft horses cross-country, viewing the landscape from an inflatable raft or the seat of a hundred-year-old wagon. Her Rocky Mountain memoir Barefoot Hearted: A Wild Life Among Wildlife was published by Villard/Random House in 2001. (This book’s great misfortune was landing in the world five days before 9/11, her first reading the night before. You can still buy a discounted hardcover—directly from her and signed!—on the To Order page of this website.)
Morning Journal
Wyoming Centennial Wagon Train, 1990
Photographer Unknown
Born in Manhattan, the only child of a scientist and a librarian, Kathleen was raised on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. A water baby by nature, she acquired a passion as early as seven for racing catboat-class sailboats, Woodpussies. It all began near the New Jersey shore, on a mile-long peninsula jutting into the Shrewsbury River. The small neighborhood consisted of families from widely varied incomes—a diamond miner at one end, the Secretary of Labor at the other, and then there was Kathleen madly mowing expansive lawns to pay for her annual fifteen-dollar sailing club membership. She crewed every summer into her teens on the boats of more affluent neighbors. Later in life, in California, at a time when she worked with troubled adolescents, she succumbed to purchasing a stray New Jersey Woodpussy—the one she’d never had in her youth—and soon set sail into the unpredictable currents of San Francisco Bay. Forever the purist (in this case, no motor), her first day out found her, with a handsome male acquaintance on board, becalmed and drifting with the tide into both the dark of night and the Richmond freighter channel—no lights on her boat, no flashlight to shine on the sail. Trapped for those long hours of terror in the open cockpit of a thirteen-foot boat, she remembers it now as the first time she needed to know how, on earth, to finesse bodily excretions with adroit elegance.
When a sophomore in high school, Kathleen moved with her parents, in an abrupt relocation across the country, to sprawling Los Angeles—a change that would leave an indelible mark on her sensibilities and, as yet unimagined, career as a writer. College years took her north to the Bay Area: Berkeley, San Francisco, and finally towns in Marin County, where she dallied for twenty-three years. She led wilderness trips for inner-city youth, and then, with a woman named Susan, started up a drywall taping company they dubbed (in lieu of the suggested Mud Hens) O’ Holy Mud. They became renown for ten years as “the women” in the trades—taping, among other places, the Grateful Dead’s office digs, the room where Star Wars was written, and Melvin Belli’s San Francisco penthouse.
And yet, Kathleen’s days remained full of the open air. She guided whitewater rafting trips all over the western U.S. and Canada and rolled across three Rocky Mountain states by horse and wagon. Her writing life first sprang from her river trips, in an era when backcountry regulations that required the use of portable toilets and the practice of packing-it-out (human waste) were just getting started. She aimed to ease the embarrassment and awkwardness that city folks faced in trying to squat in the wild, as well as to save favorite beaches from assaults of soiled diapers and toilet paper, and to protect mountain streams from fecal pollution. Her instructive guidebook, How to Shit in the Woods, grew from a collection of graceless, laughable worst-ordeal stories, many of them her own. With her second edition and its Japanese translation, she was invited to be the keynote speaker at The International Toilet Symposium & Expo 1996: “Toilets and the Environment.”
And yet, Kathleen’s days remained full of the open air. She guided whitewater rafting trips all over the western U.S. and Canada and rolled across three Rocky Mountain states by horse and wagon. Her writing life first sprang from her river trips, in an era when backcountry regulations that required the use of portable toilets and the practice of packing-it-out (human waste) were just getting started. She aimed to ease the embarrassment and awkwardness that city folks faced in trying to squat in the wild, as well as to save favorite beaches from assaults of soiled diapers and toilet paper, and to protect mountain streams from fecal pollution. Her instructive guidebook, How to Shit in the Woods, grew from a collection of graceless, laughable worst-ordeal stories, many of them her own. With her second edition and its Japanese translation, she was invited to be the keynote speaker at The International Toilet Symposium & Expo 1996: “Toilets and the Environment.”
Kathleen in the Redwoods, 1989
Courtesy of San Francisco Examiner
Photo by Carolyn Cole
It was the author’s final relocation, from California to the rural town of Victor, Montana, that supplied the grist for Barefoot Hearted. She likes to describe the move as “running away with the circus”—after meeting a rakish actor and horseshoer, a member of the Caravan Stage Company, a Canadian theater troupe, touring by means of thirteen Clydesdales and five brightly painted gypsy wagons. Garbed in her white painters’ overalls, well-splattered with drywall mud, she had stopped to snag a midday sandwich at the Belli Deli in San Rafael, when she spied an antique medicine wagon and two huge feathery-footed horses—the tent-theater’s promotional act—parked across the street. A tall Irishman’s unwinding from under one of the sturdy drafts sparked the meeting that lead to journeys by team and wagon and, eventually, to setting up marginal housekeeping in a seventy-five-year-old dairy barn, inhabited by an assortment of wild critters. Barefoot Hearted is the tale of this adventurous Western living, reflected poignantly against the author’s ponderings on the increasingly harried and threatened survival of wildlife as small towns everywhere go to sprawl.
Home Sweet Home
Kathleen has been an environmental activist now for fifty years, focusing on water politics, issues of urban sprawl, and climate crisis. She was the founding editor of Headwaters, the Friends of the River newsletter. For many years, she served on the board of Environmental Traveling Companions, an NPO offering wilderness trips to inner-city youth and special needs people. Currently, she’s on the board of West Coast Rivers Alliance, a group of conservation leaders from the western and northern United States and Canada, advocating on behalf of rivers, fisheries, and watersheds in jeopardy throughout North America. Kathleen’s travel essays have been included in the Travelers’ Tales anthologies A Woman’s Passion for Travel: More True Stories from a Woman’s World and Sand in My Bra: Funny Women Write from the Road. Her writing and photographs have also appeared in the Professional Farrier and Anvil Magazine.
Kathleen makes her home with Patrick McCarron in an old, rather unrestored (read primitive), big red dairy barn in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. The horses have all departed for the happy hunting grounds but the bats, skunks, marmots, mice, flies, and one hilarious cat remain our roommates—along with the new overactive, barn-invading clouds of stinky, migrating-north-with-climate-change, boxelder bugs. Yuk!
Kathleen makes her home with Patrick McCarron in an old, rather unrestored (read primitive), big red dairy barn in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. The horses have all departed for the happy hunting grounds but the bats, skunks, marmots, mice, flies, and one hilarious cat remain our roommates—along with the new overactive, barn-invading clouds of stinky, migrating-north-with-climate-change, boxelder bugs. Yuk!
Paco and Patrick sorting
sweetgrass for braiding . . .
© 2011 by Author Kathleen Meyer • All Rights Reserved
Website design by RapidRiver.us
© 2011 by Author Kathleen Meyer • All Rights Reserved
Website design by RapidRiver.us