Maybe
George Carlin was right
by
Robert LaFrance
The late comedian George Carlin used
to say: “When you find yourself talking about (mucous) maybe it’s time you went
into another line of work.”
Perhaps I should start thinking
about becoming a brain surgeon or cartographer, because the leading subject of
today’s column is outhouses.
At this point most of those under
the age of thirty are wondering just what the heck I’m talking about, but we
old-timers certainly remember some cold February mornings when we had to decide
whether to burst or to go outside to the outhouse to ‘do number two’ as one may
delicately phrase it.
The last time I ever had my own
outhouse was in the late 1970s after I had returned from some years in the
Northwest Territories and had built a cabin in Tilley. Since I didn’t have a
well, and therefore no way to flush a toilet, the ‘facility’ was out back of my
cabin. In the summer it didn’t seem too far way, but in February it was
approximately seven miles.
Ironically, although I was stationed
in some wild and out-of-the-way places in NWT, each of the weather stations was
equipped with a working well and sewerage system and it was only when I
returned to civilization in New Brunswick that I found myself needing a ‘privy’
outside my living area.
Some history on that privy AKA
outhouse. My grandfather Muff LaFrance (1881-1976) built it in the 1960s out
back of his little house where my cousin Tom lives today along Churchland Road
in Tilley, but Grampy had died just a couple of months before I returned to NB
and the outhouse was there. After digging a hole that would be my entire sewer
system, I took the privy on the back of a pickup truck over to my cabin. I not
only had an Eaton’s catalogue in it, but in a moment of pure braggadocio, I
installed not only a Simpson-Sears catalogue, but a Sears Roebuck one from
across the border. I wanted my guests to have the best and rub shoulders (and
other parts) with some fine merchandise.
The reader should be told now how it
was that I got onto this subject which, I admit, is not that far off George
Carlin’s criterion for changing careers.
Reading a book entitled
‘Unstoppable, the Bathroom Reader’, I came across a section about privies,
which are, when we think about it, bathrooms. At least the way we refer to
bathrooms today; they don’t necessarily have to have a bathtub or shower even
if they are called BATHrooms. As I think about it, I really wouldn’t want to
take a bath in an outhouse.
The article called our attention to
an entirely new industry that has begun in the past sixty years or so. It’s
called ‘privy digging’ and, disgusting as it may sound, we have to remember
that the organic material deposited in the outhouse hole many decades ago is
now compost and doesn’t stink at all. Indeed, to a gardener, it is like Chanel
#5 perfume.
Okay, a show of hands: how many
people in this room – for example in the lounge of the Victoria Glen Manor
where John Larsen is reading this column to some of the residents – how many
have ever sat in an outhouse and felt the January winds on their lower regions?
I described the location of mine near my cabin, but I have seen some that were
practically in the middle of the lone prairie. A person thought long and hard
before he or she went out into one of those.
A thought just occurred to me: we
hear so much nowadays about people trying to lose weight; I’m thinking that
part of the reason we’re fat is that bathrooms these days are so nice and warm
and comfortable. In the old days, a person deciding whether to have that last
serving of baked beans and brown rolls might think twice because of that lonely
building out back.
The book I mentioned said that
‘privy digging’ started in the 1950s when people started collecting antique
bottles and continues today when many treasures are found among the composted
human waste. People would throw anything down there just to get rid of it.
One final story, and this is not for
those with weak stomachs. Those folks better stop reading now. I heard about
Samuel (Not his real name) who, after drinking too much, had his head over the
outhouse hole and lost both dentures. He went back in to sleep it off and a
‘friend’ fished them out. He set them on Samuel’s table without washing them.
Samuel got up after a while and saw the teeth. I don’t dare to say what he did
with them or I myself might have to “call Europe on the big white telephone” as
the saying goes.
-end-
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