The Perils of an Outhouse by Katherine Pym

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Canvas Tent in the Woods

Based on true events, you are about to read a grumbly tale:

One weekend my dad announced we were going camping. He professed it was cheaper than motel rooms with 7 people crammed on beds and rented cots (2 adults and 5 kids), and all the meals eaten in restaurants. My parents were new to this and had borrowed the gear.

Brown Bear ready to Eat me.

Camping never appealed to me. Far too rustic and dangerous, crevasse-like gouges marred trees where bears had scraped their claws down the length of the trunks. Deep lakes and river rapids spoiled the fun. Never heard wolves howl in the distance, but we were warned of skunks and wolverines. Rabid squirrels had been found in the area. Biting insects swarmed about our ears. Horrible.

I disliked going on vacation only to work my fingers to the bone: Cooking over a campfire and lugging buckets of cold water to wash tin dishes took away from swimming and exploring. The soap always thinned in the hard water or seemed to go away altogether, which meant stuck-on food took forever to scrape off. Then, I had to find a way to dump grease from the cast iron skillets so that beasties wouldn’t find their way into camp.

I was given the task to air out sleeping bags in the morning and return them to their places in the afternoon. They always dwarfed me as I dragged them across the ground, and the sun beating down on the old canvas gave the tent a strange smell.

Headaches plagued me after sleeping on the ground. One trip we were without a tent, and arriving late to the campground, the only place left was on a hill. The next morning I had slipped to the edge of a precipice and nearly died in the night.

Memory: when between chores, mom and I walked along a path by the river, where we found a dam made of branches and sticks. “Now, Kathy don’t let your brothers disturb the dam,” Mom said. “It might be a beaver’s house with baby beavers inside.” It was interesting to think a small animal could make such a large footprint, and disturb an entire flow of a river.

Outhouse in the wilderness

Going to the toilet in the bushes or wait my turn at the outhouse was always the worst. Flies were a terrible bother, and one never knew if a bee’s or wasps’ nest had taken residence somewhere in there.

We used flashlights to guide our way through the groaning, spooky forest in the night, sit over holes where many others had squatted, and smell the leavings from those bodies. Really gaggingly horrible.

One night my brother dropped the flashlight in the hole. He returned the next day with my other brothers, one of whom was around the age of 5 or 6. They realized the flashlight hadn’t taken a dive into the sludge, but fallen onto a large pile of poop topped with toilet paper. Horrifying with stinky residue, but retrievable.

“Hey Jimmy,” Tom said. “We’ll lower you down so you can grab the flashlight.”

John nodded. “Sure. Let’s do it. We won’t drop you.”

With heartfelt innocence, Jimmy smiled at them.

“We promise,” John said as he raised the platform with the holes.

A Two-Seater

They grabbed Jimmy around his ankles and slowly lowered him into the cesspit. 

Birdsong paused. Insects stopped flying, their buzzes strangled. A raven cried terror from a tree.  Even the breezes had died in morbid expectation.

Lower and lower Jimmy went until his ankles were just above the walls of the pit. 

“Can you reach it?” Tom yelled.

Jimmy coughed. “Almost.”

Tom and John lowered Jimmy so that his entire body was beneath the pit’s rim. “Can you reach it, now?” John demanded.

“Got it,” Jimmy yelled. “Get me out of here.”

They hauled him up, clutching the fouled flashlight. “Here.” He handed it to Tom.

They ran out of the outhouse with their prize, placed it in its proper spot for the next person, never telling anyone where it had been.

Until much much later.

Truly horrible. 

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Many thanks to wikicommons, public domain & my memory.