The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was just out of college — we’re talking the early ‘70’s here — I wanted to join a commune and be a hippie. I know, a little late for the show, but better late than never, I figured. And anyway, I didn’t want to work so that narrowed my options down to very few. Bum, artist or hippie — or, in my case, all of the above. So a few of us went up to an abandoned farm in Northern Wisconsin and set up shop in an old Polish farmhouse, no indoor plumbing, a couple of electric outlets, a handpump out in the yard and a falling down outhouse.

Rick and I were the two males in the encampment so we he-men took it on ourselves to construct a state of the art outhouse. We found some lumber in the barn — which we learned later, much to our embarrassment, belonged to Ernie, the son-in-law of Felix, the farmer across the road — and armed with hammer and hand saw, we set to work. Now maybe you know how to go about outhouse construction, but Rick and me didn’t have Clue One. We were like Cro-Magnons who’d heard rumor of wheels but had never seen one in action. We knew you needed walls, roof would be good, a seat with one or two holes and of course one in the ground. That last one we figured out okay, but the rest, they were real headscratchers.

Somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd day we’d nailed together some boards, hoping, I guess, inspiration would carry the day. Eddie, our other next door neighbor, who’d probably been laughing himself sick watching from across the field, finally took mercy on us wanna-be hippies and brought over his extension cord, a skilsaw and his cousin Tony who lived in Chicago but had the house down the dirt road we all lived on. Rick and I managed to do just enough to make nuisances of ourselves while Eddie and Tony slapped up our new shithouse in no time flat.

We all sat around afterwards, all us men, drinking cheap beer, warming ourselves in manly companionship and camaraderie, pleased as punch like all masculine carpenters at our ability to erect cathedrals and skyscrapers with our own two hands. So okay, civilization rests on shaky assumptions. Nevertheless, you’d have been pleased too to have an outhouse, not the woods.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 24th, 2016 at 4:54 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.