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Few structures exemplify the rural landscape so much as the humble privy. It is a symbol of human occupation, but also a stark reminder that we haven't really conquered the privy's domain. If dams, diversion tunnels, treatment plants, and various other facets of hot-and-cold running civilization were all present, then the privy wouldn't be.
Despite this impressive absence of any need for expensive infrastructure, the traditional privy, an outhouse over an unlined pit, is a strong candidate for endangered structures list.
For one thing, development works against it. Custer County in the Wet Mountain Valley of Colorado held only 1,296 people in 1990. Most lived in town, and the rest, scattered on ranches, were so dispersed that their outhouses could produce no discernible effect on distant neighbors' drinking water.
But the neighbors aren't so distant now. At the Census Bureau's reckoning a year ago, Custer had 3,062 residents, making it the fourth-fastest-growing county in the nation. Many of those new people have bought into 35-acre ranchettes, which puts one's well way too close to the neighbor's coliform-generating outhouse.
The county had little choice but to outlaw the old privies. As of December 31, all must be closed. Those without running water can go with chemical toilets or vaults which must be pumped.
Nor is the old-time privy a feature of public land. Those outhouses at Forest Service and BLM campgrounds sit over vaults, and that's been the case since the 1960s.
We're very concerned about stream pollution,
explained Anne Ewing, forestry technician at the local
Forest Service office, who added that I take my toilets
seriously.
So seriously that she's trying to develop an
architectural history of one old-timer at the Monarch Park
campground. It's a very solid structure,
she said,
and we think it was built by the Civilian Conservation
Corps back in the 1930s. But we haven't found the
records.
Apparently it wasn't as well documented as the $330,000 outhouse -- vaulted, of course -- that the National Park Service just built in Pennsylvania.
But the main evidence that the genuine privy is vanishing is that the necessity of yesteryear has become quaint and cute, worthy of special attention like a steam locomotive or soda fountain.
In Walden, the library conducted a privy tour last year
as a fund-raiser. Some marketing material from Crested
Butte brags that the town gets so much snow that it used to
need two-story privies. Upscale gardeners now bid on
abandoned privies, hoping to restore them into picturesque
tool sheds. One local bookstore offers the 1998
Outhouses
calendar, with spectacular color
photography of privies in the desert, on the beach, and of
course among soaring peaks and verdant meadows.
None appeared as scenic as a friend's privy, close to town but not yet discovered by the county sanitary enforcement squad. It has but half a door, thus allowing unhurried contemplation of the Sangre de Christo Range rising majestically from the Arkansas River and stretching southward to Santa Fe.
Nor were any calendar outhouses as exquisitely weathered
as the first one I remember, at my grandfather's ranch
between Bill and Dull Center in Wyoming. (Bill's population
was really nine people, we used to joke -- the one fellow
who ran the general store and post office, and the
inhabitants of the two buildings in back, one 4
women
and the other 4 men.
)
A 410 shotgun hung over the door of the ranchhouse, for killing rattlers on the way to the outhouse -- where one did not tarry, since its splintered knot-hole walls were adored with wasp nests.
But I loved it when I was a little kid -- I thought Grandpa Wollen's place was quite advanced, since its toilet did not require flushing.
My mother's memories of it aren't so fond as mine -- it was 17 miles from the nearest paved road, telephone, or electricity, no easy place for a family -- but there's a similar structure permanently enshrined in family lore.
It was discovered on a Sunday drive in the spring of 1960, near Raymond on the Peak to Peak Highway. Necessity called for my mom, and so my father and my brothers and I desperately scanned the countryside from the car windows.
Soon we were rewarded -- an outhouse down by the creek, no fence in the way. Mom raced down there, to discover a sign on the door: It Ain't Either. She pulled the door open, and it wasn't, either -- it was a pumphouse.
And in the future, the few remaining privy structures will need that warning. It Ain't, Either. It's a toolshed or a photographer's prop or a perhaps even a designated historic landmark. But it won't answer the call of nature.
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