This is fictionalized history.

ROIF. Pronounced 'royf'.

Hold up your index finger. Now crook it. Not 'crooked', crook.

Now say the words, 'Removal Of Impacted Feces'.

ROIF.

This story begins spring break, 1992. My friend Carl works at an exclusive private boys school on the East Coast. He found himself in charge of a wilderness river trip with 20 spoiled punk middle-school boys. He asked me if I wanted to go along. I was in-between jobs, he was paying for the trip, and they were headed for the Rio Grande in Big Bend, Texas, one of my favorite places in the world. I jumped at the chance.

We loaded the boys into a school bus and drove for four days. You may have experienced this? Away from your ordinary diet, your ordinary routine, your ordinary toilet, you have trouble defecating? Now picture 20 spoiled punk 13 year olds.

Now picture a ten day wilderness river trip where you eat weird food and shit in a bucket.

By the twelfth day we had an emergency situation. We had a kid who hadn't dumped the whole trip and was in major intestinal pain. Carl and I discussed our options. He described the ROIF maneuver to me. I was bemused. Then he explained why I would have to do it...

"If I stick my finger up this kid's butt, I could get sued."

"Uh-huh..?"

"You can probably get away with it."

"Uh?"

"We have to do something, it's a no win situation..."

"Duh.."

"I'm paying your way..."

I dragged the kid away to a quiet spot and explained the problem. I poured two cups of strong coffee into him and showed him my crook'd finger. He doubled over in pain. We decided to wait until morning. After a sleepless night the kid could hardly stand, he was in such intense pain. We viewed each other with undisguised loathing. I pounded him full of cream-of-wheat and raisins and black coffee and showed him the finger, desperately trying to scare the shit out of him. To no avail.

Then, an epiphany. One of the punks had smuggled smokeless tobacco on board. All the kids where experimenting. Carl and I decided it was worth a chance. We confiscated the 'dip', some kind of mentholated crap, forget the name, and we shoved a big lipful into our impacted pal. Twenty minutes later he was pooping up a storm. He downloaded everything. He filled up a trashbag all by himself.

I danced on the beach.

Don't know what the moral of this story is, or even if there is a moral, just a fun story to tell...