Outhouses

Concerning my recent post about OIallie Lake Resort, one reader commented that she, or he, had forgotten about the "outhouses". This seems to me a fortunate and enviable thing, for it's not a memory that one wants to preserve in looking back on those otherwise precious and fragrant times. Those facilities were a necessity of course, but not a place any vacationer relished visiting. Rather, a trip to the outhouse was avoided as long as possible, and then carried out as expediently as possible when duty called. The outhouses between cabins 2 and 3 had been there as long as I could remember. The ones down by cabin 8 were newer, and so sometimes, if one had the time, he might walk down that way in order to avoid the older facilities. I will say, however, that the Upton's daughter, Susie, who was about my age, did her best to keep the outhouses clean--not, of course, because she was particularly interested in waste facility management, but because this was one of her jobs as a member of the owning family (along with refilling kerosene lamps, as I recall, and cleaning vacant cabins in advance of the arrival of new occupants). 

This reader, recalling also the absence of bathing facilities, wondered what our parents did to keep themselves clean. This was no problem for us kids--many of us having no great affection for baths to begin with--for we just went swimming over at Head Lake, or at one of the others among dozens of nearby lakes. A swim is the same as a bath, right? But what did our parents do? Well, I remember that my father would heat a bucket of water and pour this into a basin on the bench by the table, and this could be used, with soap, to at least clean the face and neck and upper body. Perhaps once a week, he would show up at Head Lake with a bar of soap in hand, and he and the soap would become one for a brief period of time, and then together disappear with a great splash and a cloud of suds in the frigid water. I suppose this sort of thing would be frowned upon in our day, and seen as a pollution of the lake, but back then it would have seemed to us, I think, that soap is clean and water is clean, so now they're both even cleaner.