Privy Information

One-half mile to the outhouse requires planning ahead! Our family’s favorite spot to hold our annual camp out is in a cozy clearing among the pines on Bettenson Flat in the Fish Lake Forest of Utah (9000 feet in altitude). It is a perfect place away from the regular weekend crowds. Well, perfect in all but one way – the outhouse is a half mile away across the meadow as the crow flies (see the small white dot in the upper part of the above photo). And many a pour soul has set out over that meadow with their hopes high of meeting their deadline, only to turn back anxious to find a faster method of transport.

Shuttle service, including motorcycle, motor scooter, SUV, pickup truck, and sedan was on alert 24/7. One vehicle would leave, and the sentinel at camp would watch the privy through binoculars until the shuttle was reloaded and headed back in the direction of camp. “Next shuttle to the privy leaving in 15 minutes,” the sentinel would shout. Sometimes folks weren’t fast enough and would be left standing on the dirt road in the dust of the out-going shuttle, forlornly waving their roll of TP as it unraveled in the mountain breeze.

Outhouses are known by many names: privy, biffy, kybo, dunny . . . and there are others that I won’t mention here. My granddaughter calls it “the stinky opera house.” There must be something to this because when my daughter was little she enjoyed sitting in the various outhouses from Arizona to Montana singing Bali Hai at the top of her lungs.

It isn’t a difficult thing for me to deal with outhouses in the forest – especially the new pre-fabricated concrete ones that have replaced all the pit toilets that were around when I was young – now those were stinky opera houses! But still, not difficult, for someone who was raised on a farm with the only “facility” being a ramshackle two-holer located 200 feet west of the house on the other side of the barnyard near the pigpen.

It was a long way to go on cold winter days. My brothers tried to keep a path shoveled the entire distance, but sometimes nature called during the middle of a blizzard and we kids would just tear out the door in our bare feet and high-tail it through the snow to the welcoming confines of the little out-building. There we would sit and read the Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalog, then search the back index of the books in hopes of finding at least one of the more flexible pages that made up the index to use for TP.

Who can complain about dispersed camping in the forest when only a half mile away awaits the greatest comfort of modern day camping – a forest service outhouse stocked with rolls and rolls of soft white tissue paper!