The Time Capsule | Roy Marshall

According to an organization called Southeast Green, which studies these things, the average U.S. citizen uses 57 squares of toilet paper each day. This is 50 pounds per year, a mountain of one-time trees flushed with perfectly good water, and Sheryl Crow must feel terrible.

TP consumption has gone up since she made her “Global Warming” tour a few years ago. During that tour, she gave environmental recommendations, including a one-square limit per bathroom visit. (She did allow a two or three square exception for what she called “pesky situations,” which she didn’t define. I know what she means, though, as I have them if wife gets the fried cabbage too greasy, and the sushi reaction was absolutely wild.)

Skeptics doubted a one-square movement would have much impact on global warming, and others wondered if Crow might herself fudge a bit on the fossil fuel footprint when it was disclosed that during tours she demanded four buses, six cars and three semi-truck tractors with flatbed trailers.

The “one square” suggestion came to mind this morning when wife was rearranging and encountered mom’s old picture album. In it is a Kodak snapshot that includes our outhouse, an edifice dad called “Mt. Vesuvius” (he toured parts of Europe during the war, learned to say “questo la supremo” and liked to give things names from the continent).

Ours was weathered and unpainted, ventilated by a quarter-moon on one side and a large star on the other, openings which assured an abundance of wasps, bees and spiders. On the plus side, this was before Al Gore and we wasted entire pages without feeling guilt.

When I used the term “two-holer” my wife raised an eyebrow and asked the question. Yes, I said, we did and thought nothing of it. In fact, my grandparents had a three-banger.

Wife, a city girl from Council Bluffs, was in awe. Three side by side? Sure, I said. Close relatives, an occasional neighbor. Think about five in a row, all strangers.

I have reason to believe this once was common, at least among travelers.

Because a reorganization of state agencies resulted in the state fire marshal also becoming state building code commissioner, I found myself dealing with unfamiliar issues; issues that ranged from rooftop snow load to the number of women’s toilets in arenas and amphitheaters (we tried, ladies, but I suspect you dawdle too much). I hit the books, often becoming distracted by historic minutia (did you know, for example, that a “dead-end corridor” was originally set at 50 feet because authorities decided people could probably hold their breath and run that far?)

How blueprints for an 1870, pre-plumbing, four-story hotel came to be in our building code archives I don’t know, but the bathroom arrangements were engineering genius. In order to get maximum space for sleeping rooms while providing guests with the convenience of a communal five-holer on each floor, the architect stacked units one above the other with a one-hole offset from floor to floor and a system of copper chutes and steep slides which passed through and across bathrooms on floors below and led eventually to a sump in the basement. Think of it; morning rush on the top floor would have been a cozy but comparatively quiet group, the experience more noisy on the third and for those on the first floor, with as many as 15 guests hovering above, the item labeled “xxxx chute” must have sounded like a train in an echo chamber.

Back to Sheryl Crow, who said she didn’t mind being the butt of jokes about her one-square campaign because she felt attention drawn to the issue was beneficial. Quite likely she was pleased when fans did Youtube videos demonstrating how one square really would do the job. Believers will want to take the tutorial. Why not, though, make a serious difference by erecting a family-size outhouse, cutting a moon and stars and conserving water while recycling newspapers and phone books?

(Someday we’ll do a column on the time little sister came screaming that FiFi, her calico kitten, had fallen into the mysterious depths of Mt. Vesuvius and would I please hurry to the rescue?

There are, in every life, moments when we find out what we’re made of.)

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.