I think in most cases, the bar owner would build an outhouse out back unless there happened to be a public one close by. They’d also build a hitching rail for horses out front. In a town with a saloon on almost every corner, you would do everything you could to keep someone drinking at your joint.
Why must one piss on something? You speak as if the poor bastard who has no target must hold it until he finds one.
mmm
I think some men do need a target. Haven’t you ever seen those appliques stuck at the bottom of urinals?
Or cigarette butts, back in the day? ‘Sink the battleship!’
My MIL grew up in eastern North Dakota. She said her uncle would shovel a path to the outhouse when the snow started. Once the snow got deep enough, he would place boards over the now snow canyon and they would have a tunnel to the outhouse. During the winter he would remove the frozen poop bricks and stack them behind the outhouse. When things started thawing in the spring, he would haul the bricks to a hole he dug the previous fall and bury them. This would extend the life of an outhouse hole a couple years.
“I sure miss not having indoor plumbing,” said nobody ever.
You don’t have to. But if you piss on the floor/ground, it splashes on your feet.
I grew up in a tiny town in southern Iowa. Our property had a well and outhouse but had been connected to town water sometime before we moved there in 1972. The neighbours across the road didn’t get town water until 1976. Our outhouse was pretty well built so we cut it in half horizontally and made a doghouse out of the top half.
I dunno. It seems to me that if you’re concerned about splashing, directing your stream against a wall is more problematic than watering the daisies.
You don’t have to aim it at your feet, ya know.
mmm
Well, if you’re peeing on a wall, or on anything higher than your waist, you can have sort of a feeling of semiprivacy, if that matters to you. Anyone who casually happens along can only see you from behind (I mean, if they start maneuvering around trying to get a look at your junk, it’s no longer “casually happening along”). I think there’s a certain vulnerable feeling if you’re just out in the open, even though you might not be thinking about it consciously.
And on top of that, when we guys first get potty trained as wee little fellas, we realize we have this nifty little thing in the middle of us that we can use to AIM the stream, and that’s FUN. I don’t think that little recently-potty-trained toddler ever goes completely away in most of us, no matter how old we get.
You don’t have to aim directly at the wall, either. You can angle it so it’s closer to parallel to the wall.
But it’s not a matter of aiming. If you piss on the ground, the stream gains speed due to gravity and splashes more.
When I was a nipper (about 7 yrs old) in 1958, I was at a Primary School in Chapel-en-le-Frith in Derbyshire. The boys had an outdoor urinal (with a brick shack at one end for no. 2’s). The back of the urinal was a six-foot wall; I was tallish at about 5’2".
It was our delight to pee over the wall into the vicar’s garden.
I couldn’t do this now. In fact I don’t think I could lift the jet above horizontal.
Incidentally, we were living in a remote farm cottage at the time. We had an iindoor water tap, but the loo was an outhouse 30 yards from the door, with a bucket that my Dad dosed with Elsan fluid, and weekly emptied in a pit he dug in the field nearby. I think this was pretty unusual by 1958,
In about 1998 my wife was teaching in a Primary School in Wiltshire which still had a similar outdoor loo for the young’uns. Just after she joined, they moved to a high-tech fully-fitted new school building across the road.
My next door neighbour STILL has the original brick outhouse out the back. I mean, I think she uses it to store her gardening equipment now, but it still has a loo in it.