Influential Effluent
By Tara Flanagan |
| Map by Greg Wright |
1. Unglued over toilet seat
Coloradans are still reeling from the Home Depot Toilet Seat Debacle, in which a man (who filed suit against the company Oct. 28 for $3 million) claimed he was left glued to a restroom toilet for 15 agonizing minutes after unidentified forces of evil applied a thick coat of glue to the seat. Paramedics arrived after the man said he thought he was having a heart attack and removed him from the Louisville store, but the seat remained affixed to his derriere for some time after his departure, leaving abrasions (and some degree of humiliation) when it was finally pried off. After news of the suit surfaced, folks up in Nederland said he had claimed in 2004 that he had been similarly affixed to a toilet seat in the town’s visitor center (he said he extricated himself without outside assistance). Distraught over allegations that he may not have told the truth about the first fixation, he submitted to — and passed — a polygraph test that was paid for by a Denver TV station.
2. Truth in numbers
Sure, you can wade through sales-tax revenue reports (which arrive long after the fact and tend to be duller than Olympic curling), but if you really, really need to know how truly busy your resort town has been, the best known way is to measure how much is moving through your local sewage treatment plant. Some High Country towns/districts (such as Vail) have become quite adept at getting the straight poop, as it were, beating the ski areas and chambers-of-commerce to the pertinent visitor numbers poop.
3. An oft-told tale
We believe this one falls well within the Urban Legend category, seeing as there are myriad accounts of this story with slightly different chemicals/ ignition methods/locales. Anyway, it goes like this: After an afternoon of cutting wood in upstate New York, a mountain dweller arrives home in the afternoon to retire to the bathroom. He is unaware that the wife has been cleaning the house and that she has dropped a paper towel containing flammable chemicals into the bowl. (Please, stop me if you’ve heard this before.) He lights a cigarette and drops the match into the toilet. And ka-blooey! Man survives blast save for most of his directly exposed areas.
4. An oft-told true tale
While the MG has reported on this in the past, it bears repeating that there really is a true, verifiable exploding toilet story. Last year, a man was victim to an exploding portable outhouse in Blacksville, West Virginia. He entered the premises, went to light a cigarette, and the ever-combustible methane therein went up in a poof, causing a few burns and a small media circus. A spokeswoman for the local emergency medical services said the methane didn’t “take too kindly” to the lit cigarette. The $10 million lawsuit filed against a general contractor and coal company alleged that there was a leaky methane pipe underneath the unit. But does it really matter where the methane came from?
5. No contest indeed
A 45-year-old Maine man pleaded no contest to trespassing and disorderly conduct after officials pulled him from the waste-filled tank of a women’s outhouse off the Kancamagas Highway in Albany, New Hampshire. He told police that he was searching for a lost wedding ring, but upon pumping the tank (we wonder whose job this was) and combing through the contents, searchers found nothing of the sort. The man was found in the outhouse in June after a teenage girl reported that she used the facility, only to find him staring up through the hole. “You can draw your own conclusions as to the conditions we encountered,” a sheriff’s deputy said. The perpetrator was hosed down before going into custody; officials said they didn’t know how long he had been in the tank and that he needed to be treated as hazardous material. The judge in the case has ordered him off U.S. Forest Service property in New Hampshire for two years.
6. When in doubt, go higher
We were shocked to learn of the high number of two-story outhouses located throughout the mountains of the United States. Certainly, their stature earns them style points, but the reason behind most of such structures is snowfall and the possibility of someone not being able to use a mere one-story crapper in the event of (snow) accumulation in excess of six feet. You will find these utility-designed double deckers at Encampment, Wyoming; Crested Butte (which has reported 27 to 30 feet of snow per year); and Lake Tahoe, California.
7. This one’s big and old
Montana has a two-story outhouse attached to the Nevada City Hotel. The historic “Big John” may be the most photographed building in the state, as it served stage travelers in the Nineteenth Century and people make up a whole bunch of stories about it.
8. Three’s a charm
Maine has its share of noteworthy outhouses, with a double-decker at the Bridgewater Town Hall in Aroostook County on the National Register of Historic Places. If that isn’t enough, the town of Bryant Pond, Maine, is home to a three-story model, certainly enough to upstage the mere two-story crapper nearby. Why both outhouses are necessary, we cannot say.
