Nowadays a fashionable academic notion asserts that public virtues such as community sharing, cooperation, and pulling together in times of trouble disappeared once all the barns were raised and large threshing crews disappeared with the advent of the combine. I bought the theory, particularly because I was living in a major city, where it was hard to even get to know your neighbors, let alone help them out in a crisis.

But then, thirty 30 ago catastrophe struck our hobby farm, at which we resided in summers, in my old home town of Whitehall. I reported our tragedy in my weekly column; “Two weeks ago thoughtless vandals tipped over our outhouse and broke it in twain, an act comparable to the defacing of Michealangelo’s ‘David,’ the firebombing of Dresden, the misfortune of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, and other serious catastrophes.” I went on to extol the virtues of that venerable three-holer, how it helped me conjure up fond memories of the past when Pa and I occupied holes one and three and pondered items in the previous year’s Monkey Ward catalog.  Borrowing my rhetoric from Richard Nixon, I assured my readers that Ruth and I weren’t going to give up. That would be the easy way. We’re fighters. In our cloth coats we would see our calamity through to the bitter end and would erect a new outhouse come summer.

Apparently our announcement struck a chord because we received scads of letters including one written in heroic couplets, unprintable in a family newspaper. To the rescue came Veronica Keenan, recently moved from Minneapolis to a farm in Sjuggerud coulee. She said the sight of the outhouse in her backyard offended her sensibilities. “Come and get it as soon as possible,” she exclaimed.

My brother Doug brought it in his dump truck and we got to work restoring it to its former grandeur--linoleum floor, stained plastic halfmoon window on east wall. Bucket of lime in Oriental urn with long-handled dipper, well-stocked magazine rack with unread issues of the New York Times Review of Books, and a new Monkey Ward already frayed with use.