The Old Outhouse - May it Rest In Peace

 

As we go into the Thanksgiving time of year I am thankful for inside plumbing!

 Growing up in Michigan for the first 8 yrs of life scarred me forever. We had inside plumbing. It was a travesty to a mountain child. I remember my first introduction to the outside toilet when I was 3 yrs old. Now we had traveled back down to my grandparents in eastern Kentucky many times. They had outside toilets. But as a toddler and just learning I don’t remember their outside toilets till I was 4 or so. But I was introduced to the outside toilet when I still lived in Michigan. Dad loved to take us camping at a campground called Bald Mountain totally primitive camping no utilities whatsoever. There was a lake with rainbow trout and channel catfish and we spent many a weekend and week at the park. I guess it was the closest thing that he could muster to being home in Kentucky.

The campground had no facilities. It had a single water spigot for everyone and pit toilets. Now if you have ever used a pit toilet you know that in the dead of summer, nobody wanted to camp in Michigan in the winter, they had an aroma all their own. You just didn’t want to stand down wind. Now this campground was big enough for maybe 50 campsites. So everyone was using those pit toilets. In order to keep the odor down the park crew would add a chemical of some sort. Just writing this account makes my throat get scratchy and my eyes burn. Apparently I was either allergic or just very sensitive to that chemical. Now peeing wasn’t a problem a 3 year old boy can about pee anywhere and nobody bats an eye, but number 2 oh my!!! So at 3 or 4 yrs old I didn’t want to go in there. Well, this was accomplishable over a weekend if I didn’t eat much.

However, dad got his vacation and we were there for 6 days and 5 nights.  Needless to say I was not doing well. I had a fever, couldn’t hold anything down on my stomach, and was cramping something horrible by the time we got home. Now mom was a very pragmatic woman, not that she was not affectionate, but she was just so matter of fact about everything. She got right to the questioning. When did you poop last…… Well, I had to fess up. This was the first time this ever happened to me. It was horrible. Mom laid me in the bathroom floor and put a hose up my butt and pushed in what seemed like a gallon of warm soapy water.  Mom had been a nurse aid at the local hospital so she was adept at the procedure. Without getting too graphic – I was teased in the family for years of the sound of the hard poop hitting the steel bathtub side. My brother would call me “ping ping” or “Gatling” for 2 or 3 years after that…. It made me so mad. But, relief was quickly at hand.

From then on if we were camping I learned not to hold it. I found that the toilets at the picnic area were not chemically enhanced and would beg someone to walk me to the picnic area. It was too far to go on my own. Once we moved back to Evarts there were no park folks tending to the outdoor toilets. Paw had what he called the house emergency toilet, which was an outside toilet close to the house, not too close, but seldom used with a bucket of lime to spread in after use to cut down on smell. He also had a toilet that he preferred that was down beside the chicken house about 100 feet away from the house. I remember that toilet. It was made out of rough lumber with a diamond shaped hole and a Sears and Robuck catalog sitting there beside you. You could read and when done use the pages for toilet paper. That nice soft onionskin paper index, I always thought it felt like bible pages, was always gone first.  The glossy pages were the last to go because they were like Dirty Harry. They were tough and didn’t take crap off of nobody. But, just in case, there was always a bucket of corn cobs.

Paw, who I think was joking, but I am not sure, used to say. “Use a red corn cob and then use a white corn cob to see if you need to use another red one.” Luckily I never remember using a corn cob and I was never stout hearted enough to look down in that hole and see if anyone else had either. The one big thing that was different about the Appalachian outhouses and the Michigan park outhouses was the “whaspers” wasps. Now the park personnel would keep the nests removed from the park outhouses. Paw, nor any of the adults, ever seemed to worry about them. Nowadays I wouldn’t worry about them either but as a child I was deathly afraid of wasps. I would ease to the door and gently pull it open staring at the ceiling and the sides to see if one of those pesky little critters was there. In the summer there were the snakes.

Every Appalachian family has that story of a black snake crawling out the hole after someone in the family had sat down. It was almost always a female who came out with her skirt tail over her head to get away. Well we had the same story in our family. I’ll spare my aunt the anguish of mentioning her name but she probably wouldn’t care. She too is long gone and I miss her too.

Now Granny, moms’ mother, had an outhouse and almost always there was a chicken in it on the nest. She would peck at you while you sat on the seat. Both my grandparents got indoor plumbing after we came back to Evarts. We helped both install their bathrooms. Maw and Paw got theirs in 1972 and Granny in ’73. Maw had to really push Paw to use it. Paw would say “A toilet in the house is just nasty.” We installed it in the spring of 72 and Paw did not use it once over the summer. I think he first used the inside toilet about December 10^th after we had a pretty good snow. He came to enjoy pooping in the warm especially since by this time he was nearly 65 yrs old.  We tore down and filled in the hole of the near house toilet the next spring but kept the one by the chicken house in service for several more years.

Some folks in Appalachia today still have these outhouses. They are not the worst thing you can have. They are hot in the summer and cold in the winter but a lot of folks put a modern toilet seat on them to make them a little more comfortable. I have been thinking about building me an outhouse close to the garden. My garden is a pretty far piece from the house and I am getting too old to run. It wouldn’t be one of those open pit jobs, which are illegal these days, but a more modern composting type outhouse. That might have to be a project for you all to see, the building not the using. Anyway, just remember Homesteading is a Marathon not a Sprint – Slow Down and Enjoy the Ride.  

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