of course

There were already some rolls of roofing felt and asphalt at the cabin when Carl and I got there, but it didn't look like it would be enough to do the most pressing roofing work. We bought some additional roofing materials at the hardware store in town.
Carl did the actual roof work, while I handed things up to him, and cleared away debris that fell down. It looked like there were three or four layers of rolled roofing in place, in various states of deterioration. They had probably been applied on top of each other over intervals of twenty years or so. Carl scraped off the top layer or two, to try to get a relatively even surface to work on. The asphalt roll that was already at the cabin was a different color than the one we bought, so we ended up with a part green, part white roof, which I thought was kind of appealing.
There was a little bit of asphalt roll left over, so I decided to do the outhouse roof. When I was removing the old roofing, there was a small strip of newspaper between the roofing material and the wood of the roof. It was from the fifties. It must have gotten stuck to the tar paper accidentally when it was put on, and had been sitting there for forty years or so. But then I thought maybe whoever did the roofing in the fifties had put it there on purpose, just so I could see a little bit of their time.
It reminded me of the shelves in the kitchen. I had decided to clean them off, so I threw away all the ruptured and bulging canned goods. I moved all the good cans, unmolested boxes, the old sugar jar and other things worth keeping over to the kitchen counter area and the table in the other room. Someone had covered the shelves with newspaper, and the newspaper was stuck to the shelves in places where cans had leaked. There were remnants of a mouse nest in one corner of the shelf, with a few dried skeletons of some baby mice who must not have made it through some winter. There were plenty of mouse droppings, collected over who knows how many years. As I pulled the paper up, I saw that it was from the early seventies. It was fun to see the old news and the old advertisements with old prices. I realized the dates probably coincided with time our family visited the cabin when my brother and I were very young. I imagined that my mother or father had put that newspaper down almost two decades earlier. I wondered if they had pulled up newspaper from the forties or the fifties before they put down the fresh seventies papers.
After I cleaned off the bare wood, I started putting some brand new nineties newspaper down. Then I thought I might leave another little bit of cryptic information for some future shelf cleaner. I found the cleanest portion of the old paper I had removed from the shelf and tore a section from it, being sure to include the date, and put it under the new paper.
I wiped off all of the old cans and jars and put them back on the newly newspapered shelves. I felt a real sense of accomplishment looking upon the clean, orderly, freshly newspapered shelves, and I thought maybe I had left some small item of interest for a possible future.
So when I found the strip of fifties newspaper on the roof of the outhouse, I tried to save it. Some of it was stuck and ripped when I tried to pull it free, but I got enough to show it was from mid-century. When I was ready to put new felt down, I got a strip of nineties newspaper to put next to the old fifties newspaper. Then I felt ambitious and added a dollar bill and a few coins, and nailed the felt down, then covered it with asphalt roll. I figured it was likely that those items would never be seen again by human eyes, but it was a small investment. The payoff, if it ever happened, might be in the distant future, and not to me, but I know I would have been fascinated to find a little money and two strips of newspaper from forty years apart.
While I was working on the roof of the outhouse, an occasional smell wafted up to me. It wasn't really bad, but it was enough to remind me I wasn't working in a flower garden. If an outhouse is constructed and vented properly, it doesn't really smell too bad. Grandad told me to dump some slaked lime in the outhouse occasionally, which was supposed to help with odor and decomposition.
I think either grandad or uncle Bill told me a story about an old country bar which had an outhouse. The old outhouse was in pretty poor condition, and one of the patrons of the bar was complaining about it to his friend. The bar owner said he agreed, and that he was going to start looking for someone to build a new outhouse. The friend of the patron said he was a builder and would be happy to take on the job. The bar owner was happy to have found someone so quickly. The builder and the owner went out to survey the situation, and the builder suggested that he could build the new outhouse a lot closer to the bar. The owner asked if he was sure that wouldn't be a problem. The builder told him it wouldn't be a problem at all. They agreed on a price, and the builder said he would get started the next day.
The builder finished the outhouse in a single day, much to the owner's satisfaction. He paid the agreed upon price, and told the builder he could drink for free that night, and the builder enjoyed the end of his day of work.
The next day, the bar patrons complimented the owner on the nice new outhouse, but later that night, after coming back from using the outhouse, a few patrons complained that it was starting to smell. The owner thought the patrons probably just weren't used to the new outhouse.
On the second day, some patrons were complaining about the smell of the outhouse even though they hadn't used it. The owner went outside, and he could smell it as soon as he stepped out the door. When he went back inside, he asked the builder's friend if he knew where the builder was, and if he could go get him because the outhouse had a bad smell. The friend said the builder was probably at home, and that he would go get him.
A while later, the builder and his friend arrived back at the bar. The owner told the builder that the outhouse seemed well constructed and looked really nice, but it smelled really bad, so there must be some kind of problem with it. They went outside, followed by most of the patrons of the bar. The builder went up to the outside of the outhouse, and said he could smell it too. He looked all around the base of it, and knocked on the walls, and they sounded solid. He went into the outhouse, and in a few moments came back out with a horrified look on his face. He exclaimed, "Of course it stinks! Somebody shit in it!"