During my last minute Christmas shopping frenzy, I stopped into a popular bookstore. Since I am a ninja shopper, I stopped in 5 minutes after they opened, so I had a chance to browse before indulging in a checkout line featuring only 3 people in front of me. During my browsing, I came across a calendar featuring quaint outhouses. One was perched on top of a pile of large rocks. Another was idyllic in the middle of a large field. Yet another sunk cheerfully into the ground. I am sure a fair number of people would think that these handmade not-so-porta potties were homey, endearing, and reminiscent of a simpler time. However, with the eye of a man who’s had to use them recently, I thought:
- How you gonna dig a new hole when you fill it up?
- Everyone for miles is going to see you headed to and from the poo-shed, and there is nothing around to block the smell from becoming a robust cloud of hate
- How fat was the last person to use that crapper?
Outhouses have long been featured in my upbringing. We had one upta camp (important Maine phrase. Doesn’t matter where your second summer home/hunting cabin/lakeside retreat is located, you will always go ‘upta camp’) that had a hole we had to redig every couple years. Well, you dig a new hole, move it over, and fill in the last hole, all the while hoping that you hadn’t been digging that hole through the remains of a previous hole. Complicated, eh?
Upta camp
Every hunting camp you went to had one as well, and in Maine, you spend a lot of time at hunting camp. Hunting camp outhouses tend to be a more manly affair. Summer home commodes are painted white, with iconic half-moon cutouts in the door, flowers somewhere, and an attempt made to mask the odor. Often the only light leaking to the inside of a hunting camp crapper is from the bullet holes. The only herbs available will be the moss and mushrooms that grow there, and that isn’t as much for smell masking as it is for emergency toilet paper. And let me tell you, mushrooms are last resort, to be used only if you are out of socks, pockets, and last year’s Sears & Roebucks catalog.
MOH and my cabin. Sure smelled like an outhouse!
Wherever your outhouse sits, there are important features to be mindful of:
Placement: You don’t want to be too conspicuous. If everyone knows where you are going, you are now a target. At one of Mike Oscar’s hunting camps, someone left a box of birdbombs (12 gauge shells with a primer and large firecracker, used to scare birds away. Point the gun up at a 45 degree angle and fire, the primer will gently lob and light the five second wick on a large firecracker. It will land 100 feet away and detonate). So when our favorite target Skylight Smitty went in to drop a deuce, of course we had to pepper the fart factory with M-80s. You also don’t want to be too far from the camp, because in the middle of the night, you don’t want to have to jog that far, what with the riskiness of trusting your ass-gasket against protein rich camp cooking. Also, too far a jaunt in the North Maine woods means you could risk running into Moose Moons. You do, however, need to place it far enough away from the camp so that you won’t smell anything. At our family camp, the outhouse wasn’t too far away from the kitchen window. A favorite pastime of mine was to wait until a girl cousin sashayed her way to the john, then fluff an air biscuit from the table as soon as he door swung shut. At that point, everyone in the kitchen assumes Murphy has been living on chili and beef jerky.
Ventilation: Essential. You don’t want to stew in your brew, but at the same time, you don’t want to be sitting down and facing a picture window; some expressions are best left unnoticed by passerbys. I like the hunting camp approach: a few bullet holes and shotgun blasts. These are best done from outside the shed, while it’s empty. Inside the shed is nice for single holes, but it’s gonna get loud. The half-moon approach is cute, but only when you won’t have to worry about someone dropping smokebombs, firecrackers, raccoons, or skunks in through it. Another assistant to ventilation is masking the smell: a bag of lime or ashes is marvelous here. Not only will it help cut the smell down, but when you glance down the hole (and you will. It’s like a really ugly chick: you don’t want to look, but she can’t be all that bad, can… OH MY GOODNESS her moles have mullets!!!), you just see a fine layer of powder with a TP spire poking through, like a snowy mountain peak.
The future: Sooner or later, no matter how deep the hole, she gonna fill up. And with my well-fed family, it’s going to be sooner. So you are going to have to dig a new pit and move the cuca-hut over. Mon pere attempted to move one by himself once, because he is too strong and stubborn to wait for us to show up. He tied a rope around the base of the outhouse, tied the other end to the bumper of his truck, and proceeded to motorvate. It turns out, outhouses tend to tip over rather than slide. So now you have an open pit o’poo, with a flattened, tipped over off-road commode halfway acrost it. This wasn’t pop’s first encounter with fecal misfortune; when I was little, I loved to hear my grandfather (mom’s dad) tell about the time my father, Reverend Don, nearly cleared their open cesspool with a motorcycle. Emphasis on the ‘nearly’. Another thing my father taught me was to buy big motorcycles.
Thassa beeg bike.
Identification: Make sure people know where they are headed. You don’t want to step into your shed to grab a chainsaw and find a big log on the floor. I once stayed at a camp where they recycled everything; they had 2 toilets set up. We were briefed that the one on left was for #1, the right for #2. That is all well and good; unless you are a shy 13 year old who is too nervous to ask which number is for which bowel movement. I crapped in the woods all weekend long. Mark it with the traditional half-moon on the door, maybe a cute sign on the door (‘be a sweetie and wipe the seatie works’. Or in the woods, ‘Have some class and wipe your ***’), or just prop the door open so people can see where they have to sit.
Reading Material: Personally, I used to stock my bachelor bathroom with Calvin and Hobbes cartoon books. Now that I’m married and have a child, my bathroom is a showpiece, so I can’t get away with useful reading material. I now stash a 3DS in the medicine cabinet for when I have to get away from the family. In outhouses, however, more thought has to be placed on what you are reading. In ‘summer home’ toilet facilities, you will have to humor the wife and pile in a few seed catalogs and thoughtful readings, so see if you can stash an ‘Outdoors Life’ (Pat McManus is the man!) or ‘Cycle World’ close to the bottom of the pile. At camp, the one concern is that the reading material has soft pages that you can’t easily poke a finger through. Let’s face it, your best work will be done at night anyway, so it isn’t that important. Some hunting camps, in a misplaced show of manliness, stock the logging facility with nudie magazines. For one thing, you are at camp to get away from women. For another, you don’t want to be sitting on the seat reading the pictorial on the twins, and all of a sudden find that in your excitement, you are pee-ing on the back of the door.
All this being said, poo in peace. Always remember, watch out where those huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow.
The peeing husky
No comments yet.