The Outhouse

D.E. Larsen, DVM

I have a good memory, mostly photographic, but I have difficulty reading text in those photos. I can remember outhouses from my third year. And even though I was six years old when we first got indoor plumbing, I have no memory of using one.

The first outhouse I remember was at the house on Catching Creek. We moved from that house a couple of months before I turned five. This photo is a close match for my memory. 

It was out the back door, halfway up a small climb to a field behind the house. I viewed it as a mystery in my earliest memories. Later, I can remember opening the door and peering inside as I passed by on my way up the hillside. I have no memory of ever being inside that outhouse, but obviously, I would have used it many times.

In those years, when we visited other homes, there was usually an outhouse. There were a few homes with indoor plumbing out of town. I always took note and can remember looking inside those outhouses, much like someone checking the medicine cabinet when using another’s bathroom today.

My mother grew up in a house of ten kids, six of whom were girls. In my memory, my grandparents had indoor plumbing. In fact, they had bathrooms both upstairs and downstairs. A real marvel for the time. But their outhouse was there. Out the back door, at the end of a long wooden walkway, at the edge of the field.

What was amazing to me, it was a three-hole outhouse. That must have made for an interesting event on those cold winter mornings as all those kids got ready for school. As far as I know, it was not used in my lifetime, but one never knows. We had many large family gatherings in that house.

We moved to a small farm outside of Broadbent in January, before I was five. It was a hard winter in western Oregon that year. We had nearly a foot of snow shortly after we moved. The house was an old farmhouse with no insulation, and the only heat was a wood stove in the kitchen. You can imagine, the living room was two doors removed from that wood stove, and it was not used much.

The outhouse was out the back door, at the end of a long board walkway. In January, the walkway was buried under inches of packed snow, mostly just ice.

My only memory of inside an outhouse came in that outhouse, when the snow was deep, and the night was dark.

My brother, who was seven at the time, was begging Mom to go to the outhouse with him. He was afraid to go by himself. Mom wasn’t interested in going, and he admitted he was afraid to go out there by himself. Mom made the decision that I would go.

“David is brave, he will go with you,” Mom said.

In my memory, everyone is in the kitchen, huddled around a roaring fire, in the dead of night. At least it was dark. In January, in Oregon, that meant it was at least six o’clock. Of course, I remember it as ten.

So, I end up standing in this freezing little outhouse, holding a lantern while my older brother does his business. I don’t remember a word he said, but I do remember that he talked way too much instead of getting the job done, so we could get back to the fire.

That following summer, Dad dug a new hole and moved the outhouse to its new location. I imagine that in five hundred years down the road, it will be considered a major archeological event to excavate those old outhouse sites. I am sure that the outhouse served as a convenient disposal site for all sorts of artifacts.

During the summer of the next year, we installed an indoor bathroom. My uncle Des from California came up and did the plumbing. All the local uncles were there to do the digging. They dug a large hole for the septic tank and ditches for the pipe to the tank and out to the drain field.

The drain field was just a pipe that ran out to the field where there was a slight slope. The grass grew tall there, but the cows would never touch it.

The men had a case of Olympia beer that was used during their breaks. My California cousin, Harold, my brother, Gary, and I stole a bottle of that beer and took it down to the calf barn to drink it. Being the youngest, I was just a tag-along, so I only got one closely monitored swallow.

When we would go to the old cowboy movies, I would always ask, “Where do they go to the bathroom?”

I was probably in my forties before Hollywood ever displayed an outhouse in their western movies.

The outhouse is definitely a thing of the past today. You never see one. I would guess that they are illegal now.

Photo Credit: Ken Jacobsen on Pexels