Alaskan Adventure
(The Origins of the Shit Eating Grin)
By Victor

I was lead carpenter on a construction project in the eskimo village of Togiak in Alaska one winter. We were building housing above the flood plain away from the original village site. One day I must of eaten some bad seal oil or caribou jerky and had to unload BIG time. Because of piss poor planning on the big bosses part we had no out-houses or porta-johns . Using the honey buckets in the new construction was strictly forbidden so the only alternative to a half hour round trip back to the bunkhouse was to drop trau on the tundra.

The thing about tundra is there's no trees or even bushes to hide behind so the only shelter was to climb down the 10ft. bank of the pad where the houses were placed, but not too far away where I can be seen from one of the windows. Keeping myself facing the job site I pulled down my 20 or so layers of warmth just in time and proceeded to pollute about a half an acre of pristine alaskan wilderness. Having kept my attention on the work site I failed to detect the two eskimos that had ridden up behind me on snow-machines until I heard some-one laughing his ass off. By the time we got off the hill at the end of the day the story was all over the village and my new nickname was "POO" bear.

Naturally, the topic of conversation that night in the rec-room of the bunkhouse was crap related. I was recounting to our heavy equipment operator how I think the term shit eating grin came into being and told him how one night when my girlfriend was shift nurse at a nursing home we walked into a dementia patients room and discovered he had gotten loose of his restraints and dug a HUGE doogie outa his shorts and was just going to town on it, like it was the biggest tootsie roll he ever munched, and I mimed some-one rubbing a big turd on his face while wearing a big goofy grin. Well this big burly bulldozer driving, beer swilling, moose hunting dude turns GREEN at the description, jumps up and runs out of the room gagging but manages to contain himself and comes back in. He laughs at me and says "almost lost it" well I just looked up at him with the same grin I used before and he goes green again spins around to run out again makes it one step and hurls on two other guys sitting there causing a hurl chain reaction. It was beautiful!