Some of my earliest memories are the farm where I grew up. There was a house (of course), a log barn, a well (hand pumped), and an outhouse at the top of a hill. On three sides you could look down from that hill at the woods, ponds and pastures below.
The old log barn was falling down. The logs were tumbling down from upon one another. It was a great place to play, but probably dangerous. The barn was slowly pulled down and burned over time.
The house had been abandoned and my parents fixed it up so it was livable. (I’ll tell you more about the house in other posts).
So most everything on that small plot of land changed over time except the well (it got new “innards” but there was no visible change) and the outhouse. The outhouse never changed.
The peculiar thing about the outhouse was that it had four holes. Of course for normal folks, even back then, having an outhouse was “in and of itself" peculiar. But I was at an age, when we moved into the house, that I didn’t know it wasn’t just as normal as could be. And I never gave it any thought. It was just fine to me.
Because some readers may have never visited a rural outhouse perhaps some explanation is in order about the typical rural, farm outhouse. The first thing to be explained is the word “hole”. The hole is the seat. The entire outhouse is wood. Inside there are planks of wood where a hole was cut. You would sit on the wooden plank with your rear exposed to the elements and “do your business”. “Your business” falls into a pit which was dug under the outhouse.
Modern outhouse type toilets like you might find in a county park might be chemical toilets. These are pumped out and the material sent to a sewage treatment plant. In rural outhouses there is no chemical treatment. Nature does its thing.
When an “old fashioned” outhouse gets full you simply move the outhouse to sit over some pre-dug pit. I don’t remember that every happening to our outhouse.
The four holes were in a peculiar arrangement. There were two planks with two holes each cut in them. They were on two levels. The higher plank was straight ahead as you opened the door. The other plank was lower and off to the right as the door opened. So there were two levels, one higher than the other: one obviously for children and the other for adults.
The obvious question everyone asks is / was, on what occasion would more than one person be in the outhouse. And the answer is: none. No occasion. No reason for four holes.
So the four holes were an elaborate indulgence. Pretty snobbish. So we would have been the envy of all the other people who had outhouses since we had four holes when everyone else had but one, were it not for the fact that this was the 1960's not 1930's.
I'm inclined to think that it was a woodworker / farmer with too much time on his hands and this was a joke. Maybe he wanted everyone to guffaw at his humorous invention, and be the talk of all the neighbors.
My cousin who was a city girl made a commotion when she visited because she didn’t like the outhouse. Especially when it was cold outside.
When it was cold outside you had to plan your visit to the outhouse. You would do your best to make sure everything was “taken care of” before dark and the really cold weather set in.
My cousin’s answer to cold weather was to light toilet paper on fire and drop it through the hole. I tried this myself. It was a useless effort. The heat from the paper was lost in the vastness of the great outdoors that this outhouse was, in reality, with the gaps in the boards and the door that was barely latched, not to mention the many feet drop into various unknown and unknowable semi-solids below.
The only relief from the cold she might have gotten would be a “placebo effect” from at least trying to do something when the temperatures were cold and wintery.
But, she was asked to stop the practice for fear of burning down the outhouse. The only thing worse than having “to go” in an outhouse is not having anywhere at all “to go”.
I am thankful now for what I have… for what we have. A warm house, food, indoor plumbing. But if I had to go back to an outhouse I would / we would mange, but there would be no four holer or lighted toilet paper.
©David L Arment