Becoming privy to reporter's one-holer phobia

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November 15, 2009

By Paul Fattig

Mail Tribune

The recent discovery of an old outhouse on the historic Hanley Farm in Central Point brought back memories of a childhood fear probably best left behind, so to speak.

A psycho-analyst might trace those memories back to poor potty training. While that type of diagnosis is usually so much happy horse hockey, there may be some nuggets of truth in my case.

Indeed, if you are the one who has been reading this column over the years, you have no doubt noticed a peculiar sense of humor, including a penchant for really bad puns.

So let's get to the bottom — sorry — of my privy phobia.

When I was a wee tyke in the early 1950s, my family lived in a hamlet known as Wonder, about a dozen miles south of Grants Pass. Actually, we didn't live in "downtown" Wonder, a burg so small that its name is on both sides of a signpost along Highway 199. The sign can be seen in front of the general store where we once bought penny candy and soda pop.

We lived on a dozen acres straddling Waters Creek several miles west of the store. My paternal Uncle Charles had received the land for one buck in payment for a bill a local resident owed him for merchandise bought at his store and gas station at the base of nearby Hayes Hill. My uncle later sold the Waters Creek property to my father — nearly 20 years his junior — for a dollar.

It's a pretty, bucolic region with broad leaf maples along the creek, whose waters chuckle among the rocks.

Building codes were not major concerns in Josephine County back in the day. In the late 1940s, the brothers Fattig fashioned a small cabin for my bachelor uncle on one side of the property and dug a hole for an outhouse near his cabin. Uncle Charles obtained his water from a spring which I like to think was uphill from the outhouse, although I'm harassed by doubts.

Perhaps foul water contributed to his often foul mood. But the fact that five yelling and screeching little Fattig kids, including two sets of twins born 14 months apart, lived only a stone's throw away must have been hard on the old bachelor's constitution. After all, he was born in the late 1800s, a time when children were to be seen, not heard.

Our tiny two-bedroom shack was constructed with nary a foundation, within a few feet of the creek. The house, our home until we moved "uptown" to the outskirts of Kerby just before I completed first grade in the now defunct Wilderville Elementary School, was a drafty affair. But the brothers built a handsome fireplace of river rocks and concrete with a hearth embedded with agates.

Our parents were of the old school and didn't much bother with what others take for granted. We had no phone on Waters Creek. There was no hot water. Television? Pshaw.

And the toilet was a one-seater outhouse across the creek on the side of a forested knoll we called Bears Hill.

I don't recall anyone ever seeing a bruin on that particular hill, but the name kept me alert for a fierce creature itching to leap out of the thick woods and gobble up a little urchin. An older sibling also scared the bejabbers out of me with talk of boogeymen lurking in the forest. I didn't know what a boogeyman was, but I knew it couldn't be good.

Granted, I was the biggest chicken of the brood. I could blame it on the fact I was the last to be hatched, along with my twin, born in 1951. In truth, I was born with an under-abundance of courage and an overzealous imagination.

Spanning the creek was a footbridge made of logs. A handrail made of poles ran along one side of the bridge. The outhouse, about a fourth of the way up Bears Hill, was built remarkably like the one at Hanley Farm. Apparently outhouse architecture has changed little in the past century.

I was about 5 before I started making the trip alone across the narrow bridge and up the trail to the outhouse. Always afraid of the dark, dank place, I could only muster the courage to brave the trip in the light of day.

But just as I was working on conquering my fear, it was ratcheted up another notch when a longtime friend of my dad's dropped in for a visit. If memory serves, the friend was the late Don Barnes, a former Josephine County sheriff who would retire as the longtime county treasurer.

Don was a pleasant chap who had a formal way of speaking. He told my dad about an acquaintance who died and was going to be "interred" after the funeral. I remember looking up at him, horrified at what I had just heard.

All I knew was that, not only did I have to worry about bears and boogeymen hanging around the outhouse, now there was the additional worry of falling in and being "in turd" with dead people.

Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at pfattig@mailtribune.com.

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