The Back Room

A tale of white privilege..or is it?

By Robert D Cameron

I grew up in a mill town in northeast California in the mid twentieth century living on the edge of poverty. One year my dad made only $1900 for the whole logging season due to a back injury suffered at work with no medical insurance and no workers comp to claim. Logging is seasonal work, even still. Yet we never went on “the dole”. We were too stubborn. But I have eaten government surplus cheese. It tastes fine.

While we were a perfect composition of the nuclear family, a mom, a dad, me and my brother, and a Cocker Spaniel. It was a bit more Franz Kafkaesque than Good Housekeeping, but we got the job done. Not always happily, but done.

Our house, such as it was, was a sort of combination of a cabin, shack, and bungalow. Built in the 1930’s and set upon a foundation of small logs that by the 1960’s had rotted and settled, it had only four rooms. A kitchen, a bedroom, a living room and a bathroom. There were no locks on the two doors. The stove was a wood burner that also heated water plumbed through a tank to the kitchen sink, toilet, and shower. So to cook you needed a fire. To take a shower you needed a fire to heat the water. The exterior was unpainted rough boards with bats (smaller boards) nailed over the gaps. Tarpaper roof, and a cesspool in lieu of a septic tank. Until the town put a sewer line in in the late 1950’s the cesspool had to be pumped several times a year by an old fellow who had a primitive little pump truck.  It seemed normal for the time and place we were from. The square footage all in all was perhaps 600 square feet. The bathroom had a ghastly little rusted tin shower stall with exposed piping and valves that one might see in an industrial plant. The floor drain went to the cesspool as did the toilet pipe out the back wall under a small porch. The bathroom area itself was so tiny and tucked right next to the shower that when seated on the toilet your elbows could touch the wall on the left and the shower curtain on the right. To sit, you had to face the toilet, rotate 180 degrees and sit. Your toes were inches from the door off the living room. That was a nice touch though. A door can be something to thankful for.  I think my parents bought the place after WW-2 for $1,500.00. It was fine. It was home. Politicians  like to have a Roots, a log cabin, or a Damon Runyon-esque story to tell. I have an actual one. I used to not like it. In fact I was ashamed of it. Now I appreciate it. If you sometimes don’t know where your next meal comes from because you are a little pitcher with big ears as my mother was fond of saying looking straight into my eyes. If there is strife and turmoil in your every moment, you learn to claw your way up and out. Or you don’t. If you do, you no longer worry over the small stuff. Ultimately it is all small stuff. I can live in any condition life sends my way now. So can we all if we just don’t succumb to a  defeatist default attitude. Solve the next problem. Take another step.    

As babies my brother and I slept in bassinets or a crib. We are Irish Twins..less than a year apart in age. Later we slept end to end on the living room couch as we grew. Once we were too long for the couch together, we graduated to ‘the back room’ at about ages nine and ten. We finished out our childhoods there.

There was a woodshed off the house an old ramshackle affair with a heavy wooden door and a shake roof. It was also of bat/board lumber construction. It was actually bigger than the house. It was full of wood and tools and odds and ends. Even an old blacksmith forge and bellows and an anvil. Stuff you might find today in a suburban back-yard as kitschy decor.

Attached to the rear of the woodshed was a small room with a tiny covered porch. The ‘back room’. It was perhaps ten feet by 12 feet and had two small beds a cupboard, a small table and dresser, windows, a non working wood stove and a small unplumbed sink. No toilet. There was electric service to the house, woodshed, and to ‘the back room’ as well. The distance from the front door of the house to ‘the back room’ was about 100 feet. Over the years various uncles had stayed in ‘the back room’ but they were long gone.

So when we outgrew the living room couch and were deemed big boys we were allowed to sleep in ‘the back room’. The roof leaked some and let’s just say dad was not a handyman. Sadly, I inherited that skill set as well. But we had pots to collect the drips when it rained or the snow melted. Over the years it smelled a bit moldy, but who cares. We had a little space heater to take the winter chill off. Also by that time we had more dogs. Each of us slept with a dog for added warmth in bitter winter months. Did you know that the rock band Three Dog Night’s name comes from needing three dogs in your bed on a brutal winter’s night for warmth. I always related to that, even with only one dog. So, at bedtime, even in February two little boys and the dogs trudged through often a foot of snow,  and or driving rain to go to bed.

Later during our teens we used it as the original man cave, an escape hatch to run wild, and as party central. Some who read this will recall those days. Our friends were often a little jealous of our feral lifestyle, to be frank about it, we peed off the porch.

A few days ago I told a story online that resonated with some lads I grew up with back home. A yarn about growing up with White Privilege but poor boy style. One mentioned an outhouse. Another slept “in a barn” to name two. We all went on to some level of success, despite, or maybe because of all of that rural poor kid (American) privilege.