The farm we lived on when I was a small child still had a fully functioning outhouse. A "one-seater." A "Gravity-Powered Organic Waste Disposal Unit." "A "Skunk's Parlor."
Simply put, it was a little shed out back that teetered over a ravine on four rotting red cedar fence posts.
It was made of rough barn siding, oak that was probably cut from the trees that grew on the place, a corrugated tin roof, a door with a crescent moon cut in it, a bench with a hole that the wind whistled through on a blustery day, and a place to keep whatever wiping materials you, ahem, had on hand.
What saved it from immediate destruction, unlike the rest of the dilapidated outbuildings that came with the place when we first moved in, was the fact that le pissoire was almost one hundred feet from the house and still in reasonably good repair.
The previous owners of our property, or perhaps their ancestors, had built Mr. John, and they had exploited him quite often, as told by the height of the huge mounds of wood ash and worse that had built up beneath the hole where it overhung the creek.
Let's just say that they ate extremely well, and leave it at that.
The wood ash was purely practical -- they and then we would clean out the woodstove and dump the ashes down the hole, disposing of the ashes as well as deodorizing and concealing the other stuff. Really, a pretty typical arrangement for our part of the world at one time.
Generally our permanent porta-potty would contain the odd wasp or two, a magazine, and whoever really had to go and couldn't because Dad was using the indoor version and had a new book to read and dynamite wouldn't dislodge him.
We were allowed to play in the creek it overhung, as long as we were well upstream. Downstream was unthinkable.
Mom never had to worry about enforcing that rule. That rule enforced itself.
Our stinking asset was more tolerated than embraced by my mother. Her third-generation German tidiness chromosomes twitched with indignation every time she couldn't avoid seeing the thing, only to be overruled by her German practicality genes: in a house with only one bathroom out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, something like a privy in working order is an asset. Why tear it down if it works?
This state of detente lasted nearly three years, until one evil Saturday when Mom gritted her teeth and slipped out back to use it. The beginning of the end was the sight of an eight-foot blacksnake rising cobra-like from the hole right in front of her the moment she opened the door.
The snake gave out a long, derisive hiss as all eight feet of it casually slithered over her sandaled feet and out the door, which she was still holding open in her terror.
The resulting scream got Dad off the indoor facility.
Fast.
The next day, after church and lunch, Dad put on his old Air Force fatigues, got out the sledge hammer, and sauntered towards the doomed one-seater like Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales, murder on his mind.
The four posts that supported the structure were rotten, so I guess Dad figured that all he'd have to do was give them a few smart whacks and over it would go.
Wrong.
Yes, the posts were rotted, but the remnants of the cedar trees that time, weather, and never mind had left behind might as well as been made of steel girders.
Well, the chainsaw was in the shop. Maybe we could just demolish it in sections and haul the wood off for something else?
So, with Mom, my little brother, me, three dozen Rhode Island Red hens, one exhausted but eternally-smug rooster, three scabbily-indifferent tomcats, and a developmentally-challenged sled dog as his witnesses, Dad entered the chamber of doom.
He decided to start with the back wall.
I suppose this was because it was in front of him.
Three bangs and Mom begins to scream.
No, it wasn't the return of the snake.
Remember those steel girder-like posts?
Well... let's just say that they weren't as strong as they looked.
With a groan, the entire privy began to tilt at a distinctly forty-five -degree angle over the ravine, which was a ten-foot drop, even if padded with generations of wood ash and worse.
Dad yelled "What?" in an aggravated tone of voice. When dealing with my father, an incoherent scream of terror simply isn't enough.
He was in the military.
Military people demand coherent answers regardless of the situation.
Luckily -- because by now Mom needed ten minutes breathing into a brown paper bag to calm down long enough to be able to put together a coherent press-ready statement -- Dad realized what she was screaming about.
So, as the outhouse finished tipping over in a manner not unlike the dying moments of the Titanic, Dad took a casual stride to terra firma even as the unwanted facility landed on its back, ten feet down, with a majestic, thundering crash.
It might have made us a lot of money on America's Funniest Home Videos, if we'd had a movie camera. And if we weren't at least two decades too early.
Although we probably wouldn't have been able to afford the postage anyway.
Mom was relieved that the thing was gone and that nobody was injured. We, the two kids and the dog, having no sense of danger at the respective ages of seven, four, and two, thought it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen. We wanted Dad to winch the stupid thing up out of the ravine and do it all over again. The cats didn't give a shit, and the rooster, with his limited attention span, was already back balling his harem and didn't even notice that the privy was gone.
That night, salvage be damned, Dad doused the pile with gasoline and set fire to it. The resulting funeral pyre lit up the entire backyard and could be seen all the way from the nearest neighbor's house, which was a mile away. It was so bright that our tired-but-satiated rooster began crowing, thinking that he'd overslept and was in danger of losing his job and its three dozen feathered perks, as well as his head.
The next morning we lined up at the bathroom door with our legs crossed while Dad shaved with the door locked. Painful hydraulic pressure aside, the memories from the previous hot July Sunday afternoon were well worth the wait.
Maybe one of these days I'll tell you how Dad gave us a new bathroom window using only a chainsaw, a pencil, and a screen door he found on the side of the road on his way home from work.
