The Little House Out Back

by Ben Robicheau 

 

    I was born just at the end of the outhouse era. No, I’m not talking about the Long Island Outhouses, I mean the little-house-out-back outhouse, also known as the biffy, the one-holer, the privy. I missed out on all of the novelty and romance of going out in the dark and slogging through wind, rain, and snow to go pee because the house I grew up in had been converted to indoor plumbing just a couple of years before I was born. Actually, to be truthful about it, only half of the house had been converted, it was a two-family home and the other side still had a little room in the back porch that contained a bench with a hole in it. I imagine that not having to go outside and make a forty-yard dash to get to the john when you were hit by a sudden onset of the green-apple-quickstep was probably considered quite a luxury back in the day. My Grandparents lived in that part of the house for several years, and for the most part they didn’t take advantage of this convenience, they just came over to our side and used the more modern facilities, but the little room in the back porch was still available for the occasional emergency.

    By the time I started school, most of the houses in the village had been converted over to indoor plumbing for some time so I and most of my classmates were not exactly familiar with the use of the outhouse, however we were about to become intimately acquainted with this passé practise.  To me, the big old red schoolhouse was one of the most impressive buildings in town. Surely this majestic monument to higher learning would have all the conveniences our modern age could offer.

    Not quite; there was no running water in the building and therefore, no indoor plumbing. The bathrooms, two holers, were located in a small building behind the school, ominously topped off with several louvered “stink vents”. The outhouse building was joined to the school by an enclosed walkway, so at least you didn’t have to go outside, although in the winter this made very little difference, there was no heat to this little building, and the several slotted vents in the walls and roof designed to carry away any noxious odors guaranteed that the temperature inside was pretty much the same as it was outside. I’m not sure if the designers of this building just didn’t give any consideration to the comfort, health and safety of the students who were going to be using this miracle of last-century engineering, or if it was deliberately made uncomfortable to prevent any “lollygagging”.

    A dozen years or so after modern plumbing and a growing recognition of the importance of personal hygiene had made the last of the outdoor bathrooms pretty well obsolete among the general population, we moved into the new school where we finally got to partake of the modern luxury of flush toilets and the novel experience of using the facilities without snowflakes settling in your head or bees buzzing around your knees and distracting you from the business at hand.

    By this time there were only two outhouses left in town that I was aware of, one of these belonged to Myrna Garron. Located just a few convenient steps from her back door, it had by this time been long relegated to the role of conversation piece, a quaint reminder of the past. The only regular use it got was when it was faithfully tipped over by teen-agers on Halloween night.

    What may well have been the last functioning outhouse within the village of Westport was a narrow little building located to the south of what used to be known as the Coggins house. My father owned the Coggins house and used it as a sort of bunk-house for some of the men who came over from the French Shore to work at the fishplant. Eventually he installed an inside bathroom and the outhouse, like its brethren before it, fell into disuse.

    One fine spring day, Dad decided that the yard around the house was in need of a clean-up and the by-now-decrepit old outhouse needed to go. He thought this would be a good project for me to take on, and I decided that the most economical and convenient way to get rid of an old and smelly outhouse would be to burn it. It was a hot day and the gasoline that I splashed around the inside of the little house and up the back of the door vaporized almost immediately. I closed the door and splashed the rest of the gas on the outside, stood back a few feet and tossed a match on the gas-soaked door. A barely-visible flame shot up to the top of the door and disappeared. I expected the building to burst into flames, but for several seconds there was nothing. I was just thinking I’d have to go get some more gasoline when suddenly there was a terrific explosion! I could feel the concussion as the walls flew away in different directions, the roof came off and landed upside-down in the middle of Daniel’s Lane and part of the door whizzed past my head.

    I had instinctively ducked down and when I looked up again, I saw through the slowly clearing smoke and dust, the vision of an irate Gladys Bailey standing in her yard fifty or sixty feet away. Now, you might think that Gladys would be out there to thank me for the good job I did in removing an eyesore from her neighbourhood, but no, all she seemed concerned about... and she was making sure I knew in no uncertain terms about this concern... was the heart attack I had apparently nearly caused and the rain of flaming debris that was falling down around her!

    I imagine some of the camps on the island still have outhouses, but I don’t think there are any left in town, this may well have been the last one. It was just a little nondescript building with a not-very-glamorous function, but it did its duty well over the years, and when its work was done it got to go out with a bang!