Copyright J.A. Strickland 2014--All Rights Reserved-- Backwoods Ritual: Moving the Outhouse I used to hate moving the outhouse. But, to quote an American Presidential candidate’s slogan, “doing nothing is a lot worse.” Being at close quarters with some of nature’s critters is not always edifying—though it can be uplifting, especially when it’s your hindquarters. My Daddy, like Frank Sinatra, did things his way. Other neighbors on our little dirt road off U.S. 17 had indoor plumbing with septic tanks. Only one had an outhouse and his was the proverbial brick construction with concrete flooring and the use of lye to eliminate the need to constantly move it around the backyard. Also enclosed to keep out insects and other critters. Not so my Daddy’s open-vent model. As a result, one well-established habit was looking under the seat for wasp nests before sitting down. It always amazed me how fast those paper nests could be installed by those little stealth bombers. We kept a can of Black Flag nearby. Unaware of it at the time, we were on the cutting edge of environmental consciousness with our old hand-pump insect spray. No damage to the ozone layer—though I doubt if the wasps applauded. Other critters I remember all-too-distinctly. The outhouse was an ongoing education in natural history. Moist, fresh-dug holes used to attract salamander-like lizards, with either blue and white stripes or red and white stripes. Very impressive—almost patriotic. The fifty-yard path out from the back door always seemed to meander through the sandspurs and stinging nettles in such a way as to provide a rash of exciting experiences. Once, my baby sister was seen to freeze mid-path and heard to scream rivaling the siren of the Volunteer Fire Department. I grabbed a long-handled hoe, always nearby in our snaky backwoods, and arrived in time to dispatch some poor and equally terrified copperhead who had been basking in the afternoon sunlight. But the worst scare of all was from a stag beetle—a rather large beetle with horny appendages that make him look quite fierce. It was not so much his physical aspect as his metaphysical symbolism that got me. I was fifteen and just on the cusp of decision-making, trying to choose between the life of a degenerate libertine (in accord with my hormonal imperatives) and the life of a born-again Baptist (I was to be dunked behind he pulpit the following Sunday). It was, after all, Revival Week at the local church and I had, the previous night, seen the fires of Hell illustrated all-too-vividly in oil pastels under a fluorescent light by the pastor’s assistant while the pastor went on to give us the dimensions of heaven and its location in the starry firmament, assuring us there was plenty of room if we only kept our bodies and minds free of impurities. Sitting in the outhouse, in rapt contemplation of the racier sections of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, my moral equilibrium had just tilted to the lascivious end of the ethical spectrum. My libido was just before being roused to unacceptable levels when in walks this beetle, looking like Lucifer’s own messenger, come to remind me of the Mephistophelian bargain involved in merely contemplating what Rousseau called “the solitary vice.” I fled the outhouse in mortal terror. I’ve never since been able to look those beetles squarely in the compound lenses without a queasy conscience. As you can imagine, the outhouse was not moved without disturbing a few such pivotal memories. Though indoor plumbing got installed and recorded on my scholarship forms my second year at the university, I still miss, to this day, that sanctuary of contemplative respite. Sears and Roebuck, along with my well-folded and creased photo of Marilyn Monroe, may have interrupted the purity of my devotion to science fiction or the West of Louis L’Amour, but the general rule in place in an outhouse is peace and solitude—no small boon in a tiny house with a loud TV for my increasingly deaf father. (His work above the giant digesters at the Union Camp paper mill inched him closer and closer to the TV screen with the volume ever higher. By the time he retired, he was sitting about six inches from the screen and the TV could be heard a quarter mile down the road.) Moving the outhouse was actually quite simple—almost an anticlimax after the effort required to dig a fresh hole. After that, you just levered it up alternately by the corners and waddled it across the yard until it arrived over the fresh new hole. The only catch was when the wood crumbled from dry rot and the whole edifice collapsed in a dusty heap—which did actually happen one day. That was when Daddy bought a welding machine. He made a galvanized iron frame from half-inch pipes and bolted corrugated tin over the whole thing. In my Daddy’s inimitable, Rube Goldberg fashion, by the time it was finished, he could have installed indoor plumbing several times over—both as to effort and expense. But Daddy was a conservative. I was taught to move the outhouse regularly, to support General Douglas MacArthur over that scoundrel Harry Truman, and not to join the Ku Klux Klan because it was on the Attorney General’s list of “subversive organizations.” I was an apt pupil.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 01:08:13 +0000
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