As lake lore goes, the crapper caper was too good to resist!
Harold Spillman called the Enterprise early last Wednesday afternoon in an absolute snit.
A sunken toilet had disappeared from Lower Bottle Lake’s sunken island.
Media get crackpot calls all the time, but this one intrigued me since that’s where I live and Stillman was so outraged.
He wants the commode back, restored to its historic spot under the lake’s surface.
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So I started doing the reporter thing, making calls to lake residents who’ve been around longer than I have. Word traveled like a toilet sinking into the…
According to Spillman, the toilet’s been there 50 years or so. It even showed up on Google maps, a white dot on the sunken landscape.
Everybody knew about it – but me. And Doug Kingsley, the DNR lakes guy. It was news to him.
I called my neighbor Anne. She said it came up at a lake association meeting this summer and everybody went out looking for it. My other neighbor Tim said that’s where a third neighbor caught a lunker walleye – right above the old potty.
Stillman said it disappeared this year.
“Last year it tipped over so my son dove down and tipped it up again, then sat down on the seat,” Stillman recalls. “Since he was underwater I couldn’t get a picture.”
So I rounded up my trusty dog and my geriatric pontoon, and we hit the lake, headed for Stillman’s sister’s place.
Karen Herborn and I scouted the lake for the toilet. We found the sunken island despite wave action that concealed the lighter colored water above the island and enjoyed a young loon trying to lead us to the porcelain.
But no luck. Lake residents still believe it’s out there somewhere.
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Herborn was a good sport and I took the pontoon out over the weekend without her looking for it.
It’s still MIA. I’ll look again!
Residents always made an annual pilgrimmage to the potty, I’m told.
If you have a lake lore story, email me at
ssmith@parkrapidsenterprise.com
or call me at 732-3364. Thanks!
