We Had a Privy at Core Hollow

When people ask me about off-grid living at Core Hollow, the question will usually come down to: “Without plumbing, where did you go to the bathroom?”

This question is usually asked as an embarrassed afterthought, but ‘going to the bathroom’ was simple.

We had a privy at Core Hollow.

There are many interesting terms for a privy, or outhouse, but I won’t describe these here.

If a person were a purist about recycling everything, creating the perfect biologically-closed system, our type of privy would be very much desired. It was constructed on a hillside, over a narrow cement holding tank with a cleanout door in the bottom. I needed only to step to the back of the outhouse, down the steep and gravelly incline, and, theoretically, open the cleanout door and shovel out crumbly black compost.

In theory, that was one of our tasks. But first, let me describe upon what principal this privy was supposed to work.

Waste of any sort will not compost very well without a catalyst. It will not compost at all during the cold winter months of Western Wisconsin. Be that as it may, here is the description of our composting privy.

It possessed the ordinary peaked-roof shape of privies in pictures. However, a pipe leading from inside the back of the stool and up through the roof was in place. This pipe created the kind of draw that woodstoves need to draft a fire. In this case, there was no fire, just an odor that people using it could get fired up about. The draft pipe carried odor away nicely, and the privy had a rather fresh, outdoorsy smell, somewhat due to my daughter’s taste in air fresheners.

A bucket containing grass clippings and ashes sat beside the toilet with a scoop in it. The slogan to remember was: When you poop, use the scoop. Cover that baby. The grass clippings, in summer, created heat as they decomposed and added to the composting. The ashes added minerals. Technically, the entire mass should be turned once in a while, similarly to kneading bread. This mixed the compost.

However, we were not able to factor that mechanical feature in when we built the privy, for one good reason.

Any turn-mechanism would freeze solid in a Wisconsin winter, stalling mixing and potentially breaking the device. Considering where the device was located, breakage would require a task no one wanted to approach without a hazmat suit.

In lieu of the mixing feature, on a summer day I would clatter down the ravine behind the outhouse, dragging a wheelbarrow and a shovel. Somebody had to do it! I would pull open the red metal cleanout door, and a black, crumbled, dirt-like substance would fall out, along with, for lack of a better description, a few turds that nature forgot to denature. I would shovel it out, throwing it into the wheelbarrow. I filled it high and struggled the wheelbarrow over tree roots and rocks to the compost heap not far away. Here the night soil could be mixed with other compost: kitchen leavings, garden cleanup, ashes and grass clippings. We turned this pile frequently with a fork tool as it heated, which effectively killed off bad bacteria. The policy was to keep the pile small enough to thoroughly compost itself by carting the finished product off to flower beds and the vegetable garden regularly. Considering energy, a larger pile would take more muscle than I had to turn.

And yes, trotting to a privy is inconvenient in bad weather or the middle of the night. As life for most people can be punishing enough, we also had a toilet in the bathroom. This toilet originally came out of a camper trailer. It had a regular toilet seat sitting above a square, plastic structure containing two sealed tanks. One tank was filled with water and had a baffle system to squeeze water into the toilet bowl and down into the sealed waste tank when flushed. This kept the toilet clean and odor-free. The tank for waste could be disconnected from the toilet, carried to the privy, and dumped there – a task generating cries of dismay from whomever was asked to perform it.

A flush in your bathroom at home is certainly simpler – or is it? Where does all that stuff go? This is a question that most of us never consider. We have no idea of what happens ‘down under’ in the hidden backroads of sewage disposal. The only time we take note is if the toilet suddenly backs up, burping out stuff usually safely hidden.

At Core Hollow it was neither safely hidden or convenient, but worked perfectly well!