We have a large woodshed. This time of year there’s lots of room in it because we burn a fair amount (6-8 cords) of wood during the winter to keep the house and ourselves warm.
We also have an aging septic system built in the 1970s, along with plenty of the world’s best drinking water, which flows down canyon from Nelson Lake up in the wilderness area for 6 miles down Nelson Creek, where we have a diversion ditch (cut in in 1899) that is the source of our drinking and irrigation water.
One fellow who lives out this way has a nice bathroom with a tub and shower, but there’s no toilet in the entire house. He uses a sawdust toilet in an outhouse a few steps outside his door. He’s been using it exclusively for 40 years. He’s the first guy who ever said to me, “Why do we piss and shit in perfectly good water?” Which got me to thinking. Even though we have abundant free water, it’s still a shame to see perfectly good water go to waste just because people need to do their business. So I started looking for options…
When we have house concerts and lots of guests, I set up a temporary outhouse in the woodshed, complete with a standard toilet seat, a candle, some reading material, and to keep a lid on the smell, a bucket of sawdust. I let our music-loving audience know that they have an “interesting” bathroom option: we have two full bathrooms, but we also have a really nice outhouse in the woodshed, complete with candle, matches, reading material and toilet paper, that takes you back to when this was the only way to go.
Our temporary outhouse is about to become a permanent addition to the Lapwai hacienda. There’s a lot to like about outhouses and sawdust toilets. Just a handful of sawdust is all you need to kill the stinkiest odor. Sawdust is easy to come by out here in the dog-hair forests of western Montana. I mean, trees are everywhere. So it’s only natural that people find ways to put these dead trees to good use, for firewood, for woodworking, for building. (Don’t worry, with 7 million acres of wilderness around us tree harvesting types, there’s still plenty of standing dead trees to provide homes for the woodpeckers and owls.)
Here’s the water we’re saving. The source of our drinking water is Nelson Lake, Montana, viewed from the ridge above, which is actually in Idaho. This is a terminal moraine lake, created by the advance and retreat of glaciers at least 10,000 years ago during the last ice age.
Notice there’s no pourover; water in Nelson Lake drains from the bottom just like a bathtub. Nelson Creek starts about a half-mile downslope where the stream gushes from the side of the mountain and begins its descent down the mountain. Nelson Lake water is naturally filtered to begin with, and requires only minimal filtering to drink.
So you can see, we have perfectly good water, which rolls downhill to our house for free, along with constitutional options in these parts that city people don’t usually have. We are at least allowed to have outhouses. Which means we don’t necessarily have to do our daily deeds in perfectly good water.
