Goal #886: Find and use a two-seater outhouse

Do you know how hard it is to find a two-seater outhouse nowadays?  In fact, it’s pretty hard to find a single seat outhouse any more, much less a two-seater. I remember my father telling me about the two-seater his family used to have when they lived on a farm on the plains of Minnesota. I find it amusing to think of two people sitting side by side, doing their thing at the same time. I guess privacy wasn’t a high priority back then. They were probably just happy to have a place out of the wind and weather to taken care of nature’s call.

I finally found one when I was spending the summer doing a summer internship in Hood River, Oregon. It was in 1979. I was managing an 80 acre fruit orchard. There was an old home in the orchard that must have been built in the late 1800s or early 1900s. I noticed an old clump of overgrown blackberry bushes behind the house. When I went to explore, I was delighted to find, tucked back behind the blackberry bushes, an old two-seater outhouse, just like the one my dad used to tell me about. I

t even had some really old magazines from the 1930s, which I assume were used to finish the job up. Mice had eaten into them and they weren’t much good for use as toilet paper, but it was the cool to think those magazines had been in there for so many years.

I sat down in there and just thought about how nice we’ve got it today with flush toilets and fresh toilet paper and was grateful for what I have. But I have to smile thinking about how fondly my dad remembered that old two-seater outhouse.