6 of 490: For Renting an Outhouse

Lord, please forgive my parents for renting an outhouse. They never knew it would become a landmark for drug runners.

Anytime you’re sitting in an outhouse, you reflect on your current state of life, asking deep ponderous questions such as, “How many turds would it take to fill this thing up?”

Plumbing is a modern convenience we don’t think much about these days. Whenever a toilet is flushed, waste matter and/or drug paraphernalia swirl around and magically disappear into a mysterious dark hole. Nobody really knows what happens after that…

…although I suspect that Area 51 is a government experiment to create a ruthless army of cracked out poo monsters.

Contrarily, in an outhouse there is no mystery. You know everything about the stinking experience along with the stinking experience of countless people before you, all deposited in the shallow void below.

As we were building our new house, before we had plumbing and running water, we were practically cavemen. If you were to observe our construction site you would have seen creatures dragging around tools and grunting obscene things like, “Ooh, ugh, Ahhoohguh.” Lacking the proper hygienic facilities, these same creatures would pee and whiz wherever their instincts permitted: on the dirt, in the crops…

…and sometimes from the apex of the roof.

So my parents, functioning at the comparable intelligence of a caveman, somehow decided we needed an outhouse, otherwise known as a porta potty. Maybe it was because my mom couldn’t answer the popular question, “Where’s the bathroom?” Maybe it was my father’s desire to really adopt the pre-industrial lifestyle. Maybe it had to do with my parent’s relentless commitment to make sure there son had an awkward social life…

…“Oh. So you’re the kid with the porta potty. You can’t sit at this table.”

Whatever the reason, when I saw the delivery truck pull up with a porta potty and place it on the south side of our property, I knew we had officially lost our minds. Learn from me: if you ever have a child who is involved with drug use, whatever price you have to pay to save that child, be sure to ask yourself, “Is renting a porta potty going too far?”

To this day what really irks me is that my brother or sister never had to use that porta potty, and it was because of them that we moved in the first place. So here I was, once again being subject to all manner of stupidity, and the responsible perpetrators didn’t even have to suffer through the worst parts of the thing they caused….

…it’s like instigating a fight in hockey and having someone else sit in the penalty box.

The instigator, my sister Skylar, was mad as hell about the move and was doing everything she could to avoid the reality of it. If there is a word in the English language for “I’d rather shack up with strangers and ruin my life by experimenting with methamphetamine than move to Eden, Idaho,” that’s how angry she was. She was in a bad, hopeless place…

…even more hopeless than a barren piece of land with a porta potty…

…and that’s pretty bad.

My brother rarely, if ever, visited the construction site of our new home. But it was sometime around the time we got the porta potty that my brother found out his girlfriend was pregnant…

…he had just turned 18.

Of all the things my brother could have done to cause my parent’s grief, worry, and heartache, this was an uppercut to the jaw of their belief system.

For Mormon’s, sex out of wedlock is a serious sin. We believe the power to create life should be respected on the same level as the power to take away life. Ideally, my parents desired that all their children be married in one of our holy temples for time and all eternity. Since that was not likely to happen, a civil marriage would have been acceptable. But despite their fervent prayers, their first grandchild would be born into the chaotic world of 2 active meth addicts…

…You put an innocent child amidst people using meth and things get very, very complicated. Looking back, I can see why porta potties were the least important thing on their mind.

But for me, a 12 year old boy, not only was my family a source of shame, the porta potty just added to the big stinking pile of embarrassment. I mean this was 1994, not 1894. I had only ever used a porta potty one other time in my life.

It was at a scout camp in the Salmon-Challis National Forrest. One night a group of us scouts, obedient to the buddy system rule, headed out to use the toilets. Zach was lighting the way, bragging the whole time about how expensive his flashlight was. When we finally reached our destination, each boy took a turn at the commode.

It’s hard to describe the fear of placing your bare butt over a really dark hole in the ground. Logically, you know the only thing down there is a big pile of crap, but your imagination tells you some unearthly creature is lurking amongst the excrement, waiting for the right moment when some unsuspecting scout sits down, just so it can reach up and pull the scout violently into the dark abyss…

…never to be seen or heard from again.

So it’s no surprise that Zach, shaking in fear, dropped his expensive flashlight into the dark pit.

“I need some help,” Zach said to the rest of the scouts outside the outhouse, who were unaware he had dropped his flashlight.

We all looked at each other uncomfortably as if saying in unison, “If Zach wants one of us to come in there and help him wipe, he has taken the buddy system rule a little too far.”

“I dropped my flashlight in the toilet,” he clarified.

We gasped. The other frightening scenario, perhaps equally as scary as the evil outhouse creature, is walking back to camp in the dark with no flashlight, particularly because Bigfoot was waiting to pounce on us and carry us off into the nethermost parts of the wilderness…

…never to be seen or heard from again.

Our fear of Bigfoot wasn’t unfounded. On the drive up to scout camp, my father had a captive audience and he really exploited it, getting our innocent minds all in a frenzy over Sasquatch stories. According to my father, Bigfoot was simply earth’s first murderer: Cain. My father made up some tale about how Cain’s curse for killing his brother was that he couldn’t die, but instead he was forced to wander the earth forever in misery. Of course he ended the story by saying, “We know he has already killed once. The question is…

…will he kill again?”

This explains the collective terror we felt in that moment, all huddled together outside an outhouse in the middle of the cruel, dark wilderness, no flashlight, waiting for Bigfoot to materialize from the shadows and do what he does best…

…kill scouts.

As the wind began to howl through the trees and just as Bigfoot was about to make his attack, we saw a flashlight flickering through the trees and headed in our direction. In our minds we knew this was either one of two things: either this was one of our leaders or perhaps Bigfoot had pummeled all our leaders to death with a flashlight and was now coming after us…

…clearly, logic was out the window.

Luckily it was just a leader, more specifically, Zach’s dad.

When Zach told his dad about the flashlight in the hole, his dad was obviously upset that such an expensive flashlight had literally gone to waste. Peering into the toilet hole you could see the flashlight lodged vertically in the poo matter like King Arthur’s Sword in the Stone….

…Whoso pulleth out this flashlight from this crap pile is rightwise outhouse king of the wilderness.

It was barely too deep to reach your arm down and rescue the expensive flashlight from its unfortunate plight. So to Zach’s dad, there was only one option. That option was to shove Zach into the toilet head first and treat him like one of those arcade claw machines…

…A little to the left. A little to the right. Plunge!

Zach’s dad pulled his son out of the dark toilet in one of the oddest versions of a swirly I have ever witnessed. Flashlight in hand, Zach emerged and held it up, beaming its light toward the sky. He felt he had accomplished something. In the very least, we could walk back to camp now able to chase Bigfoot from the shadows.

This traumatic outhouse experience taught me to be very cautious. So when I had to use the porta potty on our construction site, I made sure to strategically plan my bowel movements during daylight hours. In my experience, too many things can go wrong in the dark. One minute you’re taking a peaceful dump, the next minute your dad is shoving your face down a toilet hole.

I still remember midway through that summer, if you were using the porta potty, there was a good chance a Harley Davidson bike would drive by and nearly rattle the outhouse off its foundation. Come to find out, just down the road from us was a drug drop-off house for highway travelers. I have no doubt that the porta potty became an obvious landmark for these drug runners…

… “You’ll wanna take a left off the freeway, go over the hill, drive a couple miles until you see an open field with a porta potty, our house is on the right a ½ mile from there.”

Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth those Harley’s would ride.

God bless my parents. They tried so hard to run away from the drug scene in Twin Falls, but it seems no matter what they did, if followed them around. And now even the porta potty was in on the action.