I have some movies taken in front of the old Sylvan Lodge which later became the site of the Ed Erickson's first "home-built" home. Some of the footage is of my dad with a large octopus on his head (the octopus is dead, so you don't have to feel sorry for my dad), but there is also some footage of me just learning how to walk. My mom told me I was nine months old when I mastered this skill, which would've been in March or April of 1940. Of course I don't remember that far back, but I do remember bits and snatches of the Sylvan Lodge, mainly the round stone fireplace inside, and I think I remember a porch swing, and then I draw a blank (sounds like a seance or something, doesn't it?).

            I have some complete memories of times shortly after this though, and since my folks didn't own a house on the Island until 1944, all of my memories would have to be of the beach cabin we rented in front of the Lodge during the summers. (This cabin burned and the man who occupied it at the time died) My clearest memory of the cabin is of the toilet facility which was simply an outhouse over the beach at low tide, or the water at high tide. I recall that I liked using the "facility" at high tide best. I remember playing like the cabin was a boat, and no doubt brought handfuls of rocks and sticks to throw in the toilet. I don't know of any other kid who could say they did the same thing with the toilet in their house without adding the punishment for doing such an act.

            I know this isn't a gentile topic of discussion, but while I'm dealing with it, I might as well speak to the sanitation situation on Fox Island from a child's point-of-view during the forties and fifties. The previously mentioned beach cabin wasn't the only living facility that had a toilet over the beach. In fact, there are still (in the nineties) two or three buildings on Echo Bay that are built over the beach that surely had beach toilets. The Sylvan Store's service station had two beach toilets available to the public - one for men and the other (further out on the dock) for women. All the other houses that had regular flush toilets had cement pipes that took ALL the waste water directly to the beach. The house my family bought in the forties had two six inch cement pipes that came out of a bank about six of seven feet off the beach, and if you happened to be in the vicinity when somebody flushed the toilet, you were in for a visual treat (at least to a kid). Sometimes when there wasn't much to do, and the tide was out, I'd flush the toilet in the upstairs toilet and run downstairs and down to the beach just to see if I could beat the water to the beach. (I could) I said that there were two six inch pipes, but only the pipe on the west side of the point of land we owned contained sewage. The other pipe exited to the east, and only carried rain water, and wasn't nearly as much fun to watch. On rare occasions I would see the most spectacular drain pipe show of all - the pipe containing the waste water for the Fox Island Trading Post which was the store at the ferry landing. Their pipe was a good 20 feet or more from the beach, so when it produced, it might be compared to Niagara Falls, and if boys just happened to be on the ferry landing ramp you might hear exclamations of, "Wow!" come from their midst during the pipe's 10-30 second performance.

            Of course many houses had the standard outhouse, and in fact, the house we bought had a two-seater (side-by-side) attached to a chicken coop. Although I rarely used the two-seater for its intended purpose, I did regularly check it for eggs when we had a small flock of laying hens. For some reason or another, one hen picked this spot to lay all her eggs. I guess she'd never heard the old adage, don't lay all your eggs in one outhouse!