Selene Vakharia

It wasn’t long ago that I discovered something called the Bristol Stool Scale. Naturally, as it was a British friend who first mentioned it, I assumed he was going to describe a scale to depict the comfort of bar stools perfectly aligned in the pubs of Bristol, back home in England. If the bar stools were rated on a simple scale of 1–7, it would be easy to pick the most-comfortable seat in the pub to sit on and sip a pint of warm brown ale.

Porta Potty, outhouse, Johnny-on-the-Spot, and honey bucket are but some of the words people use for those plastic, square portable toilets. I chatted with Robin Fairclough over at Northwest Vacuum Services in Whitehorse about portable toilets, and got to ask every question you never thought to ask about those plastic booths. “Be careful of who you’re marrying,” Robin said to me with a laugh when I asked her how she got into the portable-toilet, septic and vacuum-truck business.

As the Kicksled Revolution rings in its fifth birthday, owner and founder Anne Middler sat with me over coffee in her downtown Whitehorse shop to reflect on the past five years and on what she hopes will come. While Kicksled Revolution officially opened its doors in the fall of 2016, Middler’s introduction to (and infatuation with) kicksleds happened long before, in 2009. “I immediately fell in love with it, like really loved it so much,” she said.