October 15, 2003

• Shifting Gears

  
  

  Warning:  content may be offensive to some sensitive individuals.

  
  

  Shift happens.

  
  

  Autumn is a transitional time.  A week or so ago, Greyfox asked diffidently if it wasn’t about time to start bringing in the outhouse seat.  That sanded and varnished buffer between the butt and the rough and splintery plywood platform over the privy trench stays out there all summer.  At temps in the high thirties Fahrenheit, the seat becomes uncomfortably cold.  When our temps drop below zero F, it goes beyond uncomfortable into painful, and somewhere below that it makes the transition into hazardous.  A frostbit butt might sound funny, but it’s no joke.

  
  

  There is a spot behind the woodstove in the living room, just inside the door we go through to get to the outhouse, where the seat spends the winter months.  If we’re quick about getting out there and plopping our nether parts on it, it actually feels warm on frosty mornings.  At twenty or thirty below zero, it has time to cool significantly between the house and the outhouse, but is still better than any of the alternatives.

  
  

  There are five alternatives that I know of:  either someone has forgotten to bring in the seat and one must choose whether to hover or sit on it at ambient temperature, or one forgets to grab it on the way out and must choose whether to come back for it, or to hover or sit on the cold splintery plywood.  Murphy’s Law of the Outhouse says that the more urgent one’s need to get to the outhouse, the more likely one is to forget to take along the warm seat.

  
  

  There is another task that tends to get put off as long as possible (and if anything about the foregoing topic aroused any squeamishness in you or struck you as grossly unpleasant, go no further).  I refer here to the rearranging of the refuse as it were, the pushing aside of the poop, getting the shit out of the way.

  
  

  The man who constructed our outhouse (a sweet, handsome, intelligent being from warmer climes who spent a brief few autumnal weeks here five years ago), must have thought of it as a temporary expedient.  As with many other ”temporary” things such as Quonset huts and blue tarps, we Alaskans have made it permanent.  He and/or his lady of the moment dug a shallow trench, covered it with a freight pallet, and arranged at one end a bucket with the bottom cut out to serve as the privy seat.  My guess is that the fellow dug down to permafrost and then went the easy way:  sideways.  The plan was to move the pallet and bucket along the trench as the trench filled up.

  
  

  Around the winter solstice that year, after that pair had split and flown south, along came Charley, my son Doug’s dad.  We were planning a feast for the solstice and I was concerned lest any of my guests inadvertently tip over the wobbly bucket or injure some vital anatomical part on the rough edges of its cut-out bottom.  Charley built for me a standard bench-style outhouse seat, leaving the bucket under the cut-out hole as a conduit between bench and trench.  As an aside, when Charley constructed the outhouse for us at the old place across the highway, he dealt with the problem of permafrost by blowing a hole in it with dynamite.   Then he hacked a lot of drainage holes in an old 55 gallon drum and sunk it in the blasted hole as a receptacle, to prevent cave-ins.  It’s a wide-spread tactic around here.  Fifty-five gallons of capacity, with a small family, is enough so that the rate of decomposition keeps up with production and the drums never fill up.

  
  

  Jono’s trench hasn’t filled up either, but the shit does pile up under that bucket.  Twice each year, in spring after it thaws and in fall before it freezes, I rearrange it.  I go out to the slab-wood pile and select a stout slab (sawn at a local mill from the outside of spruce trees: bark on one side, rough sawn surface on the other, too long to go in the stove without sawing, too much trouble to hack in two with an axe, practically useless as firewood because it burns up too fast.  A truckload of it was purchased cheaply by the pair to whom Greyfox refers as the California Dreamers, so I have an indefinite supply of poop pushers until it all rots away).  I do it on days when my sinuses are clogged.  There are advantages to having only an intermittent sense of smell.

  
  

  We have had to scrape ice from our windshields in the mornings several times already, so I know that freeze-up is not long coming.  This morning before I sat down on the warm seat I’d brought with me (three times so far in the last week, I’ve sat on it cold since one of the guys left it out there, but it was in its warm place today), I noticed that stuff was piling up.  When I brought the seat back in, I picked up my gloves and headed for the slab pile. 

  
  

  The wood was frosty and frozen together, but I managed to break a good sturdy piece about four feet long and five inches wide loose from the rest.  The rest of the chore is just gross:  stirring and pushing and shoving the shit away from under the upturned bottomless bucket and into the empty parts of the trench, then gingerly lifting the besmirched end of it out of the hole, carrying it carefully back behind the compost pile and burying it in that covenient pre-dug hole left by whomever leveled this land with a Cat years ago.  I’ve been filling that hole with my coffee grounds, banana peels and leftovers too moldy and nasty to feed to the dog–and my semi-annual poop pushing slabs of sprucewood–and it looks like I have another good decade or two of hole left to fill.

  
  

  

  • 2:46 pm
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