The diaper dilemma.

Feb. 26, El Paso.
Dylan was sick yesterday, poor thing, and I spent the day washing diapers with greenish poop in them.
Not without constant pangs of guilt, I am finding myself using more and more disposable diapers.
I see myself as a fairly conscientious environmentalist. I am a veggetarian. I recycle wherever I can (a challenge at best on the road with the circus.) I'm anal about using water, electricity, air conditioning, any source of energy. I do all this because I care about the planet we live on and try my best to leave as small a footprint as possible on it, as the Buddhists would say. So the decision to use cloth diapers came naturally.
I've always used the big bad disposable diapers at night, for as they stay dry a lot better Dylan doesn't have to swim in his own pee and poop all night long. I also quickly decided to use them when traveling, after trying the cloth way and having him develop what has been his only sign of a rash to this day. Add to that the hassle of changing an infant in all kinds of places - I've changed him on top of a stack of Coke cans in the window of a 24-hour gas station somewhere in Florida in the middle of the night, on top of an ice-cream freezer in the back of another, and a couple of times on a booth table in the truck drivers' lounge of a Flying-J plaza off the interstate - and disposable diapers soon started to look like a circus Mom's life-savers. Or at least this one.
Then people started telling me that when you consider the amount of water you use washing the cloth diapers it doesn't make sense to use them anymore, and my iron resolution started to crumble even more. Now I'm filled with doubts, the only certainty being that cloth diapers are a hell of a lot cheaper, and living on $250 a week (working seven days a week), that does make sense.
Water is always an issue when you live on the move, and you learn to use it sparingly. That has always been one thing I liked about living on the road, the way it makes you aware of the cost of things you ordinarily would take for granted and waste with abandon. A water tank can only hold as much; a generator can only give you as much electricity. We move every three to four days and usually don't have a water connection on the day after we move until very late in the afternoon; in the meantime we have to rely on the water tank.
With all that in mind I'll admit that, increasingly, I look ahead at a day of washing diaper after diaper, endlessly looking for space to hang them to dry in a trailer half as big as some people's walk-in closet, and I feel like giving in to the Big Bad Disposable lure.
But not yet.