Orcasional Musings | New uses for what? Outhouses?

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

During the early history of Orcas Island, there was a whole lot of smuggling going on. We’re just so close to the Canadian border that the temptation has always been hard to resist. And we’re on an island in the middle of a couple of international sailing lanes, so the smuggled goods weren’t always coming from our northern neighbor. In fact, what was being smuggled wasn’t always goods. For a while, it was mostly Chinese people, but that’s another story.

Smugglers need places to land their stuff, and to hide it as well. For some amount of Orcasian time, the caves at the water-edge base of Entrance Mountain, between Newhall (now Rosario) and Olga, were quite popular. They were hard to see in the first place, and, even better, their openings were completely hidden at high tide. But they aren’t accessible from the landward side, so it wasn’t easy to secretly get smuggled goods back out of the caves.

So the Grand Prize for ingenuity in the Orcasian Smuggling Sweepstakes went to the person who first figured out a brand-new use for the outhouse-shacks which overhung the water of Obstruction Pass, in the cove just to the east of the Lieber Haven Resort.

Although piped-in running water and indoor flush toilets had not yet come to Orcas, nevertheless there were toilets here which were indeed flushed. When the need arose, you walked out a narrow pier, over the water, until you came to the small shack at the end of it. There, you took your seat, did what you needed to do, and left in complete confidence that the tides would eventually, um, eliminate your deposit. It was a convenient, and even somewhat hygienic, solution to what otherwise could have been an unpleasant and odiferous problem.

The outhouse shacks were placed far enough out to make sure that there was always deep water under them to do the necessary flushing. That also made it sufficiently deep to permit a good size boat to sneak into the cove at night, and to slide under an outhouse shack. From there, the boat crew could lift cases of smuggled goods up through the open hole in the seating area to a waiting accomplice, who would stack the cases neatly within the shack. They could then safely await distribution, well out of sight. Presumably, the accomplice would hang an “Out Of Order” sign on that particular shack’s door-handle as he left.

But that wasn’t the end of Orcasian outhouse ingenuity. The children of the Obstruction Pass cove found yet another secondary use for the over-water shacks. If an ambitious child dropped a weighted line and baited hook down through the hole in the seating area, it was easy to catch a fish for that evening’s dinner. The water was deep, the child couldn’t be seen by the wary fish, and there was a comfortable ledge upon which to sit as one waited for a tug on the line.

This story of Orcasian-style alternate uses for outhouses is based upon the reminiscences of Irene Barfoot O’Neill, who spent her childhood watching smugglers and fishing quite successfully on the shores of Obstruction Pass.