throne room

There was no electricity, telephone or running water at the cabin, but it did have an old red outhouse. Originally, I think the outhouse was about thirty yards from the cabin. On a cold night, or at certain other times, that always seemed a little too far to me. It had a bit of a lean to it, and sometimes the whole thing seemed to shift slightly when one sat down. When I used it, I sometimes got the uneasy feeling that it would be possible for the whole affair to tip over backwards.
Sometimes grandad called it the outhouse, sometimes the crapper and occasionally the throne room. He always seemed proud of its most outstanding feature, the fact that it was a two seater. It was actually a sort of wooden bench with two holes in it. When I was younger, I was a little too private to ever use it at the same time as someone else, but it was nice to be able to choose a hole to sit on. The wood was worn smooth, and it was actually more comfortable than a lot of toilet seats. In the winter, sitting on very cold wood wasn't too comfortable, but as I was to find out later, it seemed to warm up faster than a conventional toilet seat.
The bottom of the outhouse was somewhat open at the back. I'm not sure if it was originally designed to be like that, but it was the state of affairs I remember. This was a problem, because it allowed mosquitos a direct attack vector to a person's most sensitive regions at a most inopportune time. It also allowed for the somewhat irrational (I hoped) fear that some wild animal like a squirrel or weasel might come into the shelter from below, and then somehow take revenge at the insults dropping down from above.
I always tried to remember to bring toilet paper from the shack. There was usually toilet paper in the shack, but usually isn't always good enough. Sometimes the toilet paper left in the shack would be rendered inoperable by dampness from rain or melting snow. It was very discouraging to sit down on the throne, only to realize that although there were three rolls of toilet paper to choose from, all three were rather soggy.
I think it was in the autumn of one year that the cabin was vandalized. The culprits drank all the booze they could find, and smashed every glass in the place, but didn't break a single plate. Or maybe it was the other way around, and they smashed all the plates but not a single glass. They also broke the ancient window panes. Not content to wreak havoc on the inside of the cabin, but evidently content to relieve themselves elsewhere, they did what I had sometimes feared would happen naturally, and pushed the outhouse over backwards. One might hope that they did that while one of their number was using it.
I think one of grandad's friends who used to come up to the shack a lot discovered the damage. He noticed a boot print in the mud and recognized the brand of boot as a relatively expensive and not very common brand. Later when he was in town, he saw a group of teenagers, one of whom was wearing this brand of boot. He confronted the lad, and I'm not sure of the details, but somehow ended up getting a confession, and the guilty youths were apprehended. I don't recall exactly what happened, but some or all of the perpetrators were from out of state, and got off fairly easy, either by doing some kind of pretrial diversion program or just posting bail and leaving the state.
The cabin was repaired, and restocked with glasses, or plates, whichever had been broken. The outhouse was moved to about half its original distance from the cabin. A new hole was dug, and a concrete floor was poured. In some ways this was an improvement, especially with regard to distance as considered on a windy winter night, and the fact that it wasn't open in the back. But its most endearing feature was lost. It was recreated as a single seater. If I remember correctly, a cinder block platform was constructed on the concrete floor, and plywood bolted on top of that, with an ordinary toilet seat bolted to the plywood. It had lost a little of its charm, and that toilet seat did seem colder in the winter, but it remained quite functional.