BUSHNELL FARM PRIVY

OLD SAYBROOK, CONNECTICUT

If you remember the last post, Rocky and Bullwinkle had just taken over the Colorado mountain within which lies the NORAD defense system.

“Bullwinkle, I TOLD you not to push that button!!”

“Well, geez, Rock, it was blinkin’ so red and pretty, I just HAD to do something!”

 

Here is a little Vestige that caught my attention two weekends ago at the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation’s “Celebration of Barns” at the 1638 Bushnell Farm at the mouth of the Connecticut River (see previous post).

The picture is of a simple privy; an outhouse is the most basic, yet one of the most important pieces of architecture on the property. ANY property.

 I mean, what would you do without it?

Well, here down in Arkansaw, we hold a terrible secret of our past in our hearts, and it has to do with privies. Or the lack thereof.

 

A LITTLE HISTORY

The southern rural lifestyle is well documented and just as well parodied, but the living-on-the-land-as-an-animal lifestyle is both apocryphal and truer than you want to know.

Arkansawyers (as well as other southern rural folk) don’t like to discuss hookworms. Be careful of bringing up this particular subject in Razorback Country; they’s a bit sensitive day-own here.

Hookworms are an intestinal parasite that are more disgusting than destructive, and they have an interesting and fun life-cycle. They start as eggs in your feces ((David Byrne asks “How did they get there?!” Wait, you’ll be unhappy you asked). Once shat out (can I say that?), they hang out in loose, warm soil (can you say southern Georgia or the Arkansas Delta?) until someone comes walking along without shoes. I won’t ask the last question in parentheses again. This, um, country person is looking for a place to drop a load. Pinch a loaf. Cut a stool.

Go back and listen to Cheech and Chong, for chrissakes.

THEY GOTTA MAKE A DOO-DOO!

But there is no privy! There is only that same stand of woods that the family has used for years, even though they continually move off to the left to avoid their, um, last leavings.

But it cannot be avoided. In three generations, they are treading on the shit they expelled decades ago. But that isn’t where the little worms are. They are in Last Week’s shit. And you just walked over it.

Welll, not you, but someone that lives that way. Unless the shoe fits. Or foo shits, in this case, acuz you ain’t got no shoes.

It’s not that these people are stupid. They know enough to be able to live well off the land, to tune 1954 Chevy pickups, to dig a new well by hand or skin a groundhog. You’ll be wishing one of these guys was your friend after The Big Collapse; they will live, and service professionals like you will die. Because they know how to dress a muskrat.

But I diverge, or something that sort of sounds like that, and that usually smells bad. Back to the country.

These people didn’t always dig huge deep holes and build a little house over it (SEE??! I TOLE you I’d come back to point!), and it wasn’t because they were lazy. Well, they were and are, but that’s because of the heat. It was because the land was so poor that these hillbillies (the better class refers to themselves as Mountain Williams, of course) had no permanent homes. Often tenant farmers or dirt farmers (buy it cheap, work it hard, leave after a few seasons), they moved along often. Moved is slow circles from their, um, movements, as well.

Hey, don't send letters. I come from a long line of dirt farmers from Northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

Here’s the disgusting part. Oh, you thought you’d already READ the disgusting part, did you? HaHaHaHAHAHA!

So the state of Arkansas was pretty much infected with hookworms from the get-go; it’s rough country with rough people, and they would walk through the dropping-grounds of yesterday with bare feet. The worm larvae would get onto their feet and enter their bodies by burrowing into their skin (I'm not making this up), following the bloodstream to the heart and lungs, then in a feat worthy of Houdini, would actually migrate to the pharynx (in the throat) to be swallowed into the alimentary canal. Taking up residence in the small intestine (in numbers), they suck blood, cause anemia, and make lots of little hookworm eggs. These are, as described elsewhere, expelled to become a neighbor to their mommas and uncles and brothers. A very successful career often follows for the whole family.

“Don’t Nora Jean look kinder pale an’ sickly, Clem? Whaddaya thank?”

“Oh, I dunno, CindyLou. She’s always looked that way. So do you, an’ me too. You seen the Sears catlog? I gotta go see a man about a dog..”

The saga continues.

I can say these things because I have lived in a mountainside cabin in Carroll County, Arkansas. So there.  Nyah.

Arkansawyers hate to even acknowledge hookworms, and often deny their existence within the state’s history, but it’s all true. Probably worse than I’m telling here. But we are supposedly hookwork-free now, as a state.

Well, some of us are. I know about ME. I haven’t walked in my own less-than-fresh shit for two, maybe three weeks now.

The privy in the picture is unlikely original, but it is old. The exterior sheathing is a 1 x 6 single-bead tongue-in-groove wood, likely longleaf pine, and by the paint layering, bottom-of-the-board deterioration, and exposed stone foundation, I’m guessing that it is likely quite a bit less than two hundred years old. But it may very well be in the same location as the original from 1678. Close to the house so the homeowner could get to it easily and quickly, even in the deep snows of the old days.

Hey, when ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

Hookworms be damned.

I'd love to dig the thing out. Outhouse pits are known to give up some great historic artifacts. No, it's safe and sanitary to dig them, as long as they weren't used recently.

Look for the little glass bay in the background left in the picture. It’ll be the Next Vestige.