The Outhouse

Of all the places to sit a spell, there are few on a par with the outhouse at our family camp. In addition to a dry if not warm but much needed spot after a morning coffee, the outhouse is full of family lore, sundry items, and information to near equal the local library.

To get to the outhouse, travel north on Interstate 95 to the Maine-New Hampshire state border. Venture across the Kittery Bridge (or it may be called the Portsmouth Bridge depending on which Old Salt you ask, but mind you, don't satisfy a curiosity to inquire about the shipyard). Travel north up the road a piece, pointing your truck toward the western Maine mountains. A bearing toward Quebec won't do you wrong. After about three hours or so, take a right; you can't miss it. About two miles on an old logging road will bring you to the camp. The outhouse is across the road from the camp, just a tad into the woods.

The outhouse sits over what once was a seven-foot deep hole. The hole and accompanying structure rotate around the woods every five to seven years or so, depending on the number of visitors to camp and the local diet. (The men of the family will proudly discuss more particulars about the maintenance if you're interested). From the outside you'll notice a saltbox roof, a bright yellow moon painted on the front, a thermometer sporting a big buck, a chopping block step, and a sign over the doorway labeled "John's John". (The name refers back to a time when a certain child who will remain nameless, liked his privacy, rightly so, and would lock the bathroom door for 'privacy'). Inside you'll notice a freshly painted green floor, white interior walls, and a gray end-box sporting a "one-holer" with a Chinese-red seat.

Once seated, you'll quickly appreciate the wide range of useful items stored within. Three mop handles, one rusty. Paint brushes, one soaking in gas in a tin can (probably once a can of Diamond clams), a bucket, and a stirrer. Three funnels, one rusty.

A spade and a crowbar speak of memories of days spent keeping a gravel road passable after wild Maine winters and wet spring rains. In late March or early April, just before the frost leaves the ground, gravel roads send out postcards to local boys inviting them to test their trucks, jeeps, and four-wheelers on the mud holes. This all turns out to be great fun for the locals and justifies the utility of the spade and crowbar. Those of you who have drained track-laden mud holes and put in town-abandoned culverts under gravel roads will no doubt nod in respect to these rugged tools. Driving a spade into the gravel always made me wonder if Thomas Edison didn't get his idea of the electric jolt when he drove his spade into a gravel road.

A gas can, a 4.5 horsepower Johnson outboard, and a Jiffy ice auger leaning in the corner speak of the year-round fishing that has gone on for generations and will continue for many more. A plastic ten-gallon pail covered with grass sod and filled with enough worms for the entire summer eliminates father-son bonding on humid August days where one turns over year-old, dry-as-dust corn stalks in search of elusive bait. A metal trashcan filled with lime, a broom, and an upper shelf lined with Quaker corn meal, Warco brake fluid, Permatix starter fluid, and Pennzoil 10W-30 motor oil.

To your left hangs a National Geographic map of New England (Supplement to the National Geographic, February 1987, page 216A, v171, No. 2) where bending at a 53 degree angle you can take in important facts about the beloved region, such as how "The Falls of the Androscoggin River furnished power for papermaking and generation of electricity for much of southwestern Maine at the turn of the 19^th century" and that "Hugh J. Chisholm helped found the Oxford Paper Company." To your right hangs a small bell and important instructions about what to do in the unlikely but 'could-happen' event of an Alaskan Grizzly Bear encounter: "Ring bell, scream, run, change your underwear."

To your immediate left on the gray end-box are two bottles of Isopropyl alcohol, a large Maxwell coffee can that protects the back-up roll of toilet paper, paper towels, and a box of wet-wipes. The toilet paper dispenser favors the right-handed and appears on that side. Depending on the last visitor, the paper rolls either off the top or from the bottom and exactly which is the correct way is still under discussion.

So you see, the outhouse is an amazing structure, one where you have to truly be there to fully appreciate. But mind you, it may be moved a few yards to the left by the time you get there.

My Gramp's Boots

I threw out my grandfather's boots today. They have been my winter boots for years since his death. They were winter boots, made to see snow and ice ... and they saw snow and ice in rural Maine for the last decade or more of his near 100-year life. They were rubber bottoms, leather tops, felt liner, rawhide laces.

For my Gramp, John Moore Longley (1898-1996), your boots were a part of you. Gramp never owned a car and walked about a mile to work each way. If he wasn't walking, he was riding his bike to Getchell Brook for some fishing. But these boots were Gramp's "snow" boots. The type of boot you wore from November until April whether walking to the store, fetching eggs out back, ice fishing, rabbit hunting, or digging out from the latest blast of snow.

I know these boots have seen weather, work, and fun. I can picture him as an older man bending over and lacing them up as he did how many thousands of times? But I can picture him as a young man, doing it the same way, just faster with a rush about like something is to be done and done now.

I treated the leather each year in the late spring like I had seen my Gramp do it, gingerly working the oil into the leather with his hand and rag, almost thanking the boots for another season well done.

So with cuts and holes in the rubber bottoms, wet socks again, and a new pair in the closet, I tell myself that this particular pair is only a pair of boots. Yet, like many memories of times gone by, both real and fictional, I want this item to be more than it is, to be around like a stone wall. I throw them out as I construct the image of my grandfather telling me that of course I should throw them out, "you gotta new pair in th' pantry."