Lake Hickory Incident

I once spent – ‘survived’ might be a better word – a winter in a summer cottage on Lake Hickory in Catawba County, North Carolina, at a place called Gunpowder Creek. This cottage had the thinnest of outside walls, no insulation, and was most definitely not airtight. The house was built on land that sloped down to the lake. The underside of the house – what you might call the ‘crawlspace’ – was completely open to the outside environment.  The floor was made of planks spaced widely apart and when the wind blew the air pressure under the house lifted the carpet off the floor. For heat I had a small electric space heater. No insulation and the exposure to outside air made life interesting. A glass of water left on a table overnight would be frozen by morning. Faucets on the kitchen sink would freeze overnight and by morning couldn’t be turned. Faucets in the metal shower stall also froze overnight. (If you’ve never gotten naked in a 20° F room and then stepped into an icy-cold, sheet-metal shower stall and tried to turn the faucets but got only a trickle of water because the faucets had frozen, and you had to wait until that trickle of water melted the ice inside the faucets so you could bathe – you’ve missed nothing.) At night I slept on a sofa under an electric blanket set on ‘10’ – the maximum setting – with several more blankets piled on top of it. It was enough to keep me comfortable – “comfortable” being a relative term here. I had no TV for entertainment. Fortunately, I had something better than TV. I had an old AM radio and every night I listened to the Larry Glick show that was broadcast by 50,000 watt clear-channel station WBZ in Boston. (If you never listened to Larry Glick, you missed a really great radio show. And if you did listen, you were likely either a 3rd shift worker or an insomniac.) And I listened to unforgettable music: Maria Muldaur singing Midnight At The Oasis, Paul McCartney singing Band On The Run, Mike Oldfield’s haunting Tubular Bells.

There were several cottages around the lake, but this anecdote is about one particular cottage. It, too, was on land that sloped to the lake, so one side of the house was at ground-level while the opposite (lake) side of the house was ten or twelve feet above the ground and supported on posts. The fellow that built the cottage chose to place the bathroom on the lake side of the house. The bathroom was constructed almost as an afterthought. It was not inside the house; it was a separate room outside the house and well above the ground, supported on “stilts”.

One summer night the owner of the cottage threw a party. During the festivities, a large, overweight woman went to the bathroom. After a long time passed and she didn’t return to the party, people in the house grew concerned. They called her name but she didn’t answer. They knocked on the bathroom door but there was no response. Finally they opened the door and discovered they were looking out into the night. There was no longer a bathroom on the other side of the door. The bathroom had fallen away from the house and toppled over on its stilts like a falling tree.

No one died, as far as I know, but there was ample embarrassment and probably a new respect, by the cottage owner, for those pesky building codes.