Trapper’s Crapper

“Trapper’s Crapper” is what is carved and painted orange on the pea green outhouse that makes everyone smile, except when they have to use it. The former owners, from Florida, the Trappers, left that among other things on the small lakeside property that my parents purchased back in 1993 to get away. Yes, we are from Wisconsin, and we had to get away.

When I was younger, the outhouse was the scariest place. I held it all night just, so I didn’t have to use it in the dark, afraid that a snake was going to slither over the lid as you searched for the extra TP stored in the empty Saltine tin.

Since that time, the bats have left the rafters. Their muffled squeaks disappeared and now live in the birch trees where they hang down in the late evening. The mice that used to come in and out and run across your feet have found a new place to live. Even the spiders have found new corners to spin their web.

A lot of life came out of that outhouse, which now acts as a storage shed, housing lawn rakes, a splitter, a small red jug labeled “lawn mower gas,” but the bag of lime still rests in the corner in a coffee can, encouraging all to take a scoop or receive a “are you serious?” from the next person. That person doesn’t exist. We don’t go up to Michigan much anymore. I guess we don’t need to “get away” as much, but what exactly are we running from? Can’t be anything more frightening than that unknown of the outhouse: you never know what might come out of the ground.

When do we eat?

My family measures their life by time, not time as we usually see it in minutes and hours, but by the time we eat--breakfast, lunch, and supper.

I grew up in a very German household where your schedule worked around meals, not the other way around. It was always the same meal: meat (venison, beef, or pork), potatoes (mashed, hashed, fried, or baked) with the occasional noodle, and a vegetable (the last thing everyone put on their plate). My father, German like my mother, but with an Irish kick to him, always asked my mother every night, as we ate supper at the table that was leveled out with a magazine, before he had even finished his plate--"What is for supper tomorrow?"

Food was fuel in our house, not something you had time to enjoy unless it was dessert, but something you needed to do in order to move on with your day. "Full" wasn't a word we used in our house, "more" was.

Now I measure my day by the next meal. I'm always hungry. I could go for some of my mother's Swedish meatballs. (Not everything in our house was German.)

Grandpa Gene

Grandfather Gene is pushing 90.

He shot the big guns on the USS Missouri. My father has a picture on the mantel of teenage Gene next to the big ship. His eyes have stayed the same fresh blue, yet they seem to be saying, "I want to walk fast." He told me once when I was younger that the thing he misses the most is being able to walk out into the woods, sit in his tree stand, and wait for a buck to come through the brush with his gun perched on his lap.

Now, every day, up at the crack of dawn, he smokes a pack, heads to the D&D where he drinks well into the afternoon, takes a nap, smokes another pack, eats whatever my mother has dropped off--usually chocolate cake, smores bars, or pumpkin bars. (Dessert is a meal to my grandfather.) Then he smokes some more.

Doctors in Madison at the Vetern Hospital tell him to never quit smoking. It will be a shock to his system. . . . My grandfather has to smoke, so he doesn't die.