Toward the end of a road trip with my family in early July, at a rest area on I-84 just west of Boardman, I found myself thinking about the philosopher John Dewey. More specifically, when I walked into the public restroom at that rest area, I thought of the following sentence, which appears in a book Dewey wrote almost a hundred years ago called The Public and Its Problems: “There are trees which can grow only in a forest.”
There was little that was leafy or poetic about that rest area restroom, but Dewey’s atypically poetic line popped into my head because that particular public restroom, which I warily entered after riding for hours in what felt like the comfortably private space of my family’s car, pushed me to think about the challenges and offerings of what we mean by “public.”
The idea of the public is, for me, associated with things that are shared, things that many different people should have access to. But Dewey goes further than that: “The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.” The public restroom—like the rest area where it’s located and the road it adjoins, like public libraries and public schools and public buildings and public lands—is systematically cared for by officials charged with considering how a wide range of people are affected by the direct and indirect consequences of transactions that take place there.
In order for that public restroom to exist and function as intended—for the stalls and sinks to be clean and well supplied, for the relevant budget to be drawn up and approved as part of many other publicly meaningful budgets, for Oregonians to envision together how the state ought to feel to those who travel through it—hundreds and perhaps thousands of designated officials need to consider a whole host of impacts and people impacted. This, even more than who uses that restroom or the way it is used, make it a “public” restroom (as distinct from a privately owned restroom in, say, a gas station or restaurant). I think this is what Dewey means when he writes, “The essence of the consequences which call a public into being is the fact that they expand beyond those directly engaged in producing them.”
The public restroom is a place where the urgent needs of drivers and passengers on I-84 are met, but it is also a place that asks people who may never drive on I-84 to think about what kind of public we are and hope to be. This may sound absurd, or lofty, or absurdly lofty, but I also think it’s true: the public restroom compels us to reflect on the kind of forest we hope to build, constitute, and live in together. The public restroom originates in response to immediate individual biological imperatives—yet at the same time, by the fact of its existence and the need for it to be officially (rather than privately) managed, it summons a long-term, communal, aspirational public into greater clarity and being.
If it’s true, as Dewey writes, that some kinds of trees can grow only in a forest, it seems to also be true that we human beings, more than trees, can make choices about where we grow—whether in relative isolation or in some sort of forest. We can also make choices about the kind of forest we grow in, who flourishes (or doesn’t) in that forest, and even who manages and cares for different elements of that forest. And this is why Dewey’s line came to me at that rest area just before the Fourth of July: because the more we see ourselves as responsible for making these kinds of choices, the more clearly and fully the forest—or a society that is also worthy of the word “community”—can emerge.
This shared responsibility, in an admittedly odd way, is what that public restroom just west of Boardman meant and still means to me. In John Dewey’s words: “The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy.”
Adam Davis is executive director of Oregon Humanities.
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