OUR “NEW, MODERN OUTHOUSE

THE OUTHOUSE: RIGHT BEHIND THE HOT TUB

I live in a retirement community north of Tucson, Arizona. We live in the nicest house I have ever owned. It is not grand or fancy or even very expensive by 2020 standards, but it is still what most would consider a nice, modern home.

We love to host parties. We have a small, but very well decorated and pleasant looking backyard facing a beautiful desert hill with various kinds of cactuses and teaming with deer, bobcats, quail, rabbits, a few javelinas and lots of birds. I say all this to set the scene because whenever we are planning a party I have a re-occurring dream. It is not a nightmare, but it does wake me up with an uneasy feeling.

In my dream, several couples gather on our patio, saying nice things about our funky yard art and great views of the desert and the Catalina Mountains. Inevitably someone asks the question, “Where is your restroom?” In my dream, I have no hesitation. I tell them, “Oh, the outhouse is just past the hot tub” and point toward a rectangular wooden structure set against the beautiful desert background. It is made of old, moldy, cedar siding with a wrinkled corrugated tin roof. The door is a quarter sheet of plywood with a small piece of rope for a door knob. I tell them to make sure to pull the door tight and to wipe off the seat because “the men just don’t have good aims.” I mention that if they don’t see any toilet paper, there is a new Sears catalog on the apple box to the right of the hole.

The visitor does not bat an eye. He/she thanks me and heads toward our outhouse with margarita in hand. I go about being a good host for our several guests.

Evidently, having an outhouse for the first 12 year of my life has affected me somewhat. I was lucky in that before I was too old to realize that we were one of the few families in Salkum who still had an outhouse, we moved to Mossyrock. Our trailer house at the Rock n Roll Bowl Trailer Park was not a mansion, but we did have an indoor bathroom. I think my older brothers and sister had a little harder time with the outhouse experience than I did.

But, oh, do I remember the outhouse! The original one was free standing, like you see in cartoons. It had been just to the right of the garage behind our small house. But, eventually, the hole was getting full. Also, we had to walk several feet from our back porch, on a narrow path, to get to the outhouse. In the winter, this was not fun.

Dad filled in the hole with dirt and had planted peas. The peas grew very well.

Dad decided that a new one was to be very fancy and modern. That, I believe, is my first encounter with an oxymoron – a fancy modern outhouse. He dug a hole about four feet by six feet and 5 feet deep. He wanted this outhouse to last a while. He placed the hole directly behind the garage so that the back side of the garage was actually the front side of the outhouse. It was large enough that when you entered by going through the garage, you actually had to turn left and take a couple of steps before encountering the raised wooden bench with a hole cut in it about the approximate size and shape of a real toilet. Dad had sanded the wood around the hole to make it more comfortable. He did not hold back in making this a fancy and modern outhouse.

I need to explain what I mean by what we called a garage. It was not a garage in the modern sense. It was actually a large woodshed. It was about 25 feet by 15 feet with a dirt floor. The siding was made of old scrap lumber and you could see through the cracks between the boards. On the right side entering from the center opening (there was no door), was a huge pile of wood for building fires in our kitchen wood stove. A large cast iron pot belly stove was in the middle of this space and in the winter, was usually filled with a roaring fire, making the entire woodshed nice and toasty, despite the lack of insulation. Beside the stove was a large chopping block with a long handled and very sharp axe leaned against it. This is where we (mostly my Dad and brothers) split wood blocks into usable pieces, cut kindling and lopped the heads off various small animals, including my pet chicken. That sad story is for another time.

On the left side was Dad’s workbench, acetylene cutting torch with full tanks and his welding stuff. The workbench was always cluttered with parts of various projects he was working on. Immediately to the left were wall to wall ceiling height shelves full of canned goods. Some of the quart jars were moldy and ready to explode, others OK to eat. Choosing the correct ones to take in for dinner was always an adventure; kind of like playing Russian Roulette with canned stringed beans.

Going through the middle of all this was a trail to the outhouse.

Despite popular tales about catalog pages being used for toilet paper, that was not really true (well, except in dire emergencies). The pages were used, however, for placing over the hole and then crimping down the sides to fit the hole prior to sitting down. This was needed because the males, lucky enough to be able to pee standing up, had terrible aims and also really did not care.

However, Dad, knowing this to be a problem in our family of four males and three females (one being Gramma who would throw a fit when she sat down in someone’s pee) had a solution. Now, comes the fancy part. Dad had found a toilet seat and he screwed it onto the platform seat. We could actually put the seat up and down. Newspaper and Sears Catalogs were still there in case the males, mostly my two brothers, still did not bother to put the seat up before peeing.

Beside the platform/seat were two apple boxes, one on top of the other. The catalogs and magazines were placed in the boxes. A roll or toilet paper was on top of the box along with a bowl of water and a towel changed daily by Mom, Gramma or me. There usually was a role of paper towels there as well and sometimes even a bottle of sanitizer available. Again, fancy and modern!

Dad had also rigged it up so that when we stepped out the backdoor of our house, we reached up to the right and flipped a switch on a fuse box. That turned on the light on the porch, in the garage and inside the outhouse. In the winter, it also turned on an electric space heater, which sat facing the toilet seat. We are now talking Town and Country Magazine stuff!

I started using the outhouse when I was about five. I had been using my trusty potty chair that was beside the kitchen stove in the kitchen next to Gramma’s room. My Dad and siblings were not excited about having pee and poop next to where food was being prepared, but, being the baby of the family, my Mom always gave me a lot of slack. She probably would have let me pee and poop in that chair until I had my driver license, but Dad finally put his foot down and said it was time for me to suck it up and start using the outhouse. After all it was fancy and modern.

First, however, there was the lesson in peeing off the back porch. The guys in the family all peed off the back porch. It was way easier than going all the way to the outhouse, which, after all, was another 20 feet away. I liked this because I did not have to worry about my brother turning out the lights when I was on the pot in the outhouse and I would have to feel my way back through the garage in the dark. So much pee on the little patch of grass between the porch and the garage left several brown spots for which we blamed our dog, Tippy. Little did my sister, Marylyn, know that when she was sunbathing in that spot during the summer, she was lying on several gallons of her brothers’ pee.

I did, however, have to eventually start making the trek through the woodshed to do the old number two. As mentioned, my biggest fear was Jim turning the lights out once I was on the pot. There were other considerations as well.

My routine would be to wait until Mom was in the living room so she would watch Jim. Dad was transfixed on watching Maverick, Gunsmoke or The Honeymooners to notice or care if Jim was up to something. I would quietly mention something about having to pee, hoping this would make Jim think I was just going to the porch. Once outside, I would turn on the lights and then check for any critters – porcupines, skunks, possums, garter snakes – that might be around. Our dog, Tippy, usually chased them away, but not always. I would run across the large wood plank that was our sidewalk of sorts to get to the woodshed from the porch. In the summer this was no problem. However, it was way less comfortable in the winter, when we would run bare footed, across the plank that would be covered in frost or, worse, an inch or two of snow. Shoes? We were too lazy to put on our shoes and Mom would not allow us to get our slippers wet.

Once inside the outhouse, I would try to do my business as quickly as possible. I was successful most of the time. However, those times Jim eluded Mom’s watch and pulled the switch, I had the task of negotiating the trail through the woodshed in pitch dark. I can still visualize getting past the jagged metal by Dad’s workbench on my right making sure to not touch the still hot pot belly stove on my left and then trying not to step on any pieces of kindling that may be in my path. Once I reached inside I would yell at Jim for turning out the lights. Mom would yell at Jim to quit being so mean to me. Dad would yell for everyone to shut up so he could hear Miss Kitty tell Marshall Dillon to “be careful Matt.” Jim would fain being remorseful, but as soon as possible, would give me the little, “ I gotcha again” smile.

Whatever Jim did to me regarding the outhouse pales in comparison to what he did to himself which became a family story told for years. Jim had to start wearing glasses when he was about 12. He hated them and “lost” them a few times, which made Dad very upset. One time, how he did this, I have no idea, he lost them in the outhouse hole. He tried to convince Dad that it was an accident, but Dad really didn’t care. He gave Jim a pair of his White Ox logging gloves and a flashlight and told him to head to the outhouse with Dad not far behind. I happily went along to see this event. Jim, at first, used the end of a fishing pole and a large three pronged hook to fish around in the stinky mess in the hole. After a few attempts with the fishing pole, he told Dad that it was no use. The glasses were lost. Dad took the pole away and told Jim to “look closer,” indicating he needed to stick his head in the hole and look around.

Dad had dug it pretty deep and Jim had to actually stick his head and right shoulder inside the hole and reach down with his right hand as far as he could to hunt for the glasses. Jim was pretty skinny and he easily could have gone all the way in the hole. He took a quick look and said he could not find them and pulled his head and shoulder back out. Dad would have none of that. He told Jim to stick his head and both shoulders back in that hole and that he would hold onto his legs while he took a much closer, and sickening, look.

He was gagging and so was I, but I was enjoying it way more than Jim. I don’t remember how long the whole process took, but for Jim it probably seemed like hours instead of the actual minutes before he grabbed the glasses and Dad hoisted him out. Jim put the glasses in Clorox and then in boiling water before wearing them again.

Jim and his buddies had another harrowing experience with an outhouse that belonged to a neighbor. We may have been the very few families in town with and outhouse, but, there were a several old single guys around who still had one. On Halloween the tradition was to tip over their outhouses. They were very small, obviously had no foundation and were easy to push over by two or three trouble making boys. Jim and his buddies had been doing this for 2-3 years and the old boys, being tough old WWII veterans, never complained to our parents, but they would cuss out the boys. When Jim was about 13 or so, he and his buddies headed out on Halloween to have their fun. As they approached Old Man Clapp’s house, a strange thing happened. Old Man Clapp had moved his outhouse back five feet and left the hole covered with fir branches. Jim and his two buddies broke through the branches and landed hip deep in Old Man Clapp’s crap. As they began yelling and screaming for help, Old Man Clapp came out, threw down a wooden ladder and then hosed off all three, while laughing the whole time. He then quit laughing, took out his double barreled shot gun, pointed it at them and said to never come near his house again. Needless to say, that was the last outhouse they ever knocked over.

A few things I do remember is how cold that seat was in the winter, even having frost on it at times. That is when the Sear’s pages came in handy to keep my butt from frostbite. And, yes, the bra pages seemed to be the last to go.

I also remember the yellow jackets in the summer. The outhouse was near the pea patch which attracted bees of all kinds, especially yellow jackets, which packed a pretty good sting. Sitting on the bench in the summer was no fun anyway because the smell was more intense as the temperature rose. Dad would throw down some white powder substance, I think Lye of some kind, to keep down the smell, but it was not much use. My wife, Sally, says I cannot smell anything and she may be right. My olfactory nerves may have been shot by sitting on that bench for so long over time. Back to the bees. There was nothing worse than sitting on the bench half done with your duty and then hearing the sound of bees coming from….. where? Underneath the seat! There are only a couple of options at that time and both are bad.

I kind of vaguely remember being uneasy about having friends over to our house by the time I was in the 6^th or 7^th grade. The kids I knew from Salkum were not a problem. They knew and accepted that if they wanted to use our house as a hangout between swimming and baseball playing and use ourfrig and garden to get snacks and watch our television, then they would not make a big deal out of our outhouse. I do think some kids kind of “held it” until they got home or in the case or the boys, just went off into the woods now and then. I was uneasy about having friends, who I had made at school, come to our house. I went on sleepovers at other kids houses and I remember Mom telling me not to forget to flush, but I really never asked them to come to my house. I think the outhouse was the reason why. That, and maybe the fact that I slept on a cot in the living room. That is story for another time.

I do know it bothered my sister a lot. She was six years older than me and was pretty sensitive anyway. I think it bothered Jim and Rich some, but they hid it as best they could. I know that when they were in grade school, we had kids at our house all the time, but by the time they were sophomores they were rarely home and hardly ever had friends outside of Salkum to the house.

I was lucky in that living in a house with an outhouse until I was 13 did not affect me that much. However, why do I keep having that dream?

Above is a representative example of our outhouse. The picture on the left is fairly close, except ours was a little wider and we had our apple boxes as stands on either side. We had an actual toilet seat as well. The photo on the right was about how the original outhouse looked before Dad moved it behind the woodshed. He filled in the hole and planted peas.