[Paddlewise] Urine: washing with/drinking

The drinking urine thing is very simple, just as is drinking sea water:  If 
necessary, one's body draws water from the bloodstream to dilute seawater or 
urine [or even whatever you ate for lunch today, which is why a glass of 
water should accompany every meal].  And it IS necessary in the case of 
liquids too salty or too full of toxins to be absorbed as they exist when 
swallowed.  So drinking sea water, or urine, will take more liquid out of 
your blood that it will put in, resulting in, inevitably, death.


Washing in urine is mentioned in every ethnography of the polar inuit that I 
have read.  And I have read a bunch.  Urine for washing hair used to be 
stored in a bucket in the home.  Babies were washed in urine just at birth, 
since it was a readily available supply of hot water.

I've paddled in different parts of Greenland in each of the past three 
summers and never saw anyone wash in anything other than water, but the 
reports from a hundred years ago, and even fifty years ago, are that urine 
was readily used.

Jim Tibensky

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