Donovan Kelly
Crummy But Good Writer with a Lighter Touch
This is a true story about a goat that begins and ends in an outhouse. If you have just read a story about a goat and an outhouse, you can skip this one. But you'll be sorry.
The worst thing about the outhouse was that it was a three-holer. Sure, I worried some about the wasps that nested there and flew freely around my exposed ten-year-old butt. The biggest worry remained the three holes. Why would there be three holes except to accommodate three people? What if Dad and Grandma came to join me? What would we talk about?
This early fear of being caught wordless in awkward situations between older authority figures still haunts me. At parties and in supermarket lines, I feel myself tense up. What could I say? Commenting on the weather never felt right. Dad always knew the latest forecast and Grandma was what we lovingly called “funny.”
In her senility, Grandma remembered well the weather from 50 years ago, but not today and not you. Today she was legally blind and mentally somewhere else, but proudly never admitting anything was wrong. When she came out of the outhouse, our job was to gently nudge her onto the path back to the main house. The nudging skill later proved valuable in guiding senile bosses who also were reluctant to be guided.
When Dad finally replaced the outhouse with an indoor toilet, he could not bear to waste such a fine building. The outhouse became a challenge, a project. While the leaky roof over our heads cried out for repairs, he spent days moving the outhouse into the orchard, planking over the dreaded three holes, installing a feeding trough about goat high above the former seats and devising a wooden frame to hold a goat in place. Thus our three hole outhouse became the world's most comfortable one-goat milking house. Now all we needed was a milking goat.
When friends walked home with me from school, I would announce that Judy, our new goat was potty trained. When they demanded proof, I would untie Judy and off she would streak to the outhouse. Judy saw corn in the feeding trough and udder relief. My friends saw only a goat trained to use an outhouse.
“Your family is strange,” my friends said often. Maybe. Nobody else had a milking outhouse for a goat. But like kids everywhere, we learned many skills of unknown future value, like goat milking and grandma guiding. And we learned to pray for little things, like never having to share a three-hole outhouse with Dad or Grandma.
Later in life, sometime during my second failed career as a scientist, a theory of three-hole outhouses was explained to me by a senior hydrologist with lots of field experience in farm country. He suggested that the multiple holes were a practical early means of waste distribution. A way of spreading out the special non-wealth generated by outhouses. A way to put off the odorous task of moving an outhouse to a new location over a newly dug hole by simply expanding the waste distributed to the existing hole in the ground. Some smart farmer discovered it was easier to carve three holes in a pine sitting plank of the outhouse than to dig three holes in rocky soil.
I found this wisdom fascinating, that some smart farmer had hit upon such a simple solution to reduce the forced migration of outhouses and to cut back on all the hard manual labor involved in aiding and abetting that migration. The fact that I found this so fascinating further explained my difficulties in making polite conversation at social gatherings.
Outhouses can be so hard to work smoothly into the conversation, and my eagerness to do so did not add to my social luster. Meanwhile, all this new insight did little to ease the lingering scar of my crowded outhouse syndrome. Curse you, Three Hole Outhouse!