Hillbilly like me. (Part 8 - Do you have an outhouse?)

[Author's Note: If you're eating a sandwich right now, you may want to come back later. This one isn't for the squeamish or the eating.—Buzzardbilly]

Well, if I did I'd throw you in it!

How's that for an answer? It might not be appropriate and it sure wouldn't do shit for providing the questioner with a better image of West Virginia (and, yes, that truly does matter...even on a one-to-one basis from average schmo to average schmo), but my how satisfying it is to piss the ignorant off sometimes—like passing by a corn dog for a juicy steak hot off the grill.

For a person who is old enough to remember when quite a few of the interstate rest areas in West Virginia were equipped with outhouses, it's really hard for me to lambaste someone for the outhouse question. OMG were those interstate outhouses foul, too! There were plenty of times as a young child when we stopped at one of those lovely guest amenities our state provided and the smell kept us from even entering. That was alright because there was always a well-worn, heavily used path leading from the official state outhouse to the woods where any visitor was welcome to deposit their waste (a metaphor for their opinions of our facilities too, I believe).

That was in the 1970s. Kinda hard to blame people who might've traveled through the state in the 70s and wonder about our love of outhouses then, isn't it?

The interstate outhouses were nicer than your average outhouses. They weren't your classic wooden outhouse, with a wooden seat, and a hole cut in the door for light. These were actual buildings, often with two stalls, and running water in the sinks. Yes. Ponder that. Plumbing to the sink, but that three extra feet of plumbing to the toilet was just out of our budgetary reach. (Honestly, it was most likely the miles of pipe to a sewage treatment plant that stopped that. And, it is easier to have the honeydipper [that's what they called the folks who removed the shit from the shithole under the outhouse] dip the honey from an outhouse than a septic tank.)

As I recall, the toilet holes were permanent fixtures up out of the floors, but I can't remember if it was a large pipe with a toilet seat on top or what. One particular interstate outhouse was that way for sure. I remember it vividly because, despite the stench and flies, I didn't want to go in the woods. I had non-woods-like business to take care of, you see. As Mom and Little Buzzardbilly ventured in I can remember her telling me not to touch anything until she said it was okay. Nothing could've prepared my young mind for what we saw once we were in there.

It both smelled and looked as if someone had saved buckets and buckets of cow manure (not the kind you buy at the hardware store for your garden either, this was fresh off the ass tap, possibly from cows who feasted on nothing but chili, sauerkraut, pickled corn, Slim Jims, and beer). It looked as if the shit-saver had stood at the door of the single stall and splashed bucket after bucket of shit on most every surface. Sure, there were cleanish spot here and there...well, uncoated, non-lumpy spots here and there, but there were poop splats all over the toilet seat and pipe, on the walls, on the floor, everywhere. I couldn't imagine in my young little mind what horrid illness could cause a person to shit that way. It was as if someone's entire body had literally filled with fecund fecal matter, then they walked in there and exploded.

Mom said, "Start backing up right now!" There would be no business done in that outhouse. None at all. Matter of fact, the mere sight of it was enough to knock any need for business-doing right out of me for some time.

I remember passing people on our way out...people who were coming out of the woods...people without accents pointing to the path and saying how no one could be expected to take a dump in that dump. There's more to that story, but that is for another time.

It's enough to say that I don't get miffed at the outhouse question. Especially when I look at my nice warm go-mug that I purchased at Yeager Airport's welcome-to-WV gift shop: It says "Great Houses of West Virginia" and pictures all sorts of outhouses on it. Ain't that nice?

Instead I explain that outhouses were a norm at a time when there wasn't municipal sewage, and that was decades ago. I might even tell them about when my Grandpa and Evil Granny got indoor plumbing. Grandpa was totally uncomfortable with the whole idea. He said it wasn't right to shit in the house. A lifetime of "you don't shit where you live" was hard for him to overcome. Until winter ;)