Al Kyte's Life Take-Aways

Some nights are more memorable than others.  One I won’t forget occurred on a fishing trip into the mountains of south-central Alaska.  In the middle of that night, I woke to find that I needed to answer nature’s call.  I rolled out of my sleeping bag, grabbed my shoes, tip-toed downstairs and out the cabin door, and walked over to the outhouse.  When I was finished with my business there, I tried to leave that outhouse, but couldn’t.  I was locked in!  How could that have happened?  Well, to get into that outhouse I had lifted the little hook on the outside of the structure’s door, and that hook had fallen back into a locked position from the impact of the door closing behind me when I entered.  It was 4:00 AM, I was in my long johns, and trapped.  There was no way I was going to call for help, because as the leader of the group I would never hear the end of it.  And I wasn’t going to damage the outhouse.  How was I going to get out of there?

I found that I could crack the door open a quarter of an inch so knew that all I had to do to get out was to find something rigid to poke through the crack and lift the hook upward.  So I started looking around for an old nail.  There wasn’t even one.  That was the most neatly constructed outhouse I have ever seen.  The only thing I could find in it was one magazine, which proved too flimsy to lift the hook off.  There wasn’t even a roller for the toilet paper, and I didn’t wear glasses then. It was looking bad, but in the back of my mind I had been thinking of something that just might work.

I sat down and removed the shoelace from one of my shoes.  With one hand I held the door open that quarter of an inch and with the other hand started to “hand cast” that shoelace back and forth like a fly line.  After a few attempts, the lace went knifing through the crack and became draped over the shank of the hook.  I hung on to my end of the shoelace and slid the cover of the magazine through the crack to capture the other end that was hanging down barely outside the door.  In that way I was able to bring that end of the shoelace back in through the crack.  Once I had both ends in hand I could raise them high enough to lift the hook up from its locked position and open the door.  I was free! 

The next morning when I told the anglers in my group what had happened, one guy seemed to doubt my story.  Later, when he noticed me go into the outhouse, he locked me in.  I was forced to use my shoelace escape a second time.  Why does there always have to be a skeptic?