Rob Phillips: A cellphone's unexpected trip into an outhouse toilet

The author's phone in none-the-worse-for-wear after an unfortunate plunge

into a Port-O-Potty on a recent fishing trip.

I’ve had a couple of unusual occurrences involving my cellphone on some fishing trips during the past month.

The first happened a week ago when, hold on, I know this is going to be hard to believe, I forgot my phone at home! No calls coming in. No calls going out. No texts coming in. No texts going out.

I couldn't check my emails. I couldn't look at Facebook. No looking at the weather forecast, or the fish counts over the dam.

At first, I was panicking. How would I communicate with the world? Then, cooler heads prevailed. Who was really going to need to reach me during the ten hours I was sitting in a boat?

And if they did, how important was it going to be?

For the first 40 years of my life, I didn't have a communications device in my pocket. I could certainly go a day without my phone.

After fretting about it for the first hour or so I finally came to terms with it, sat back and just enjoyed the rest of the day. It was freeing, frankly. I intend to do it again one of these days soon.

The more traumatic phone event came a couple of weeks earlier, when again I thought I had left my phone at home after leaving for a five-day fishing trip to the Astoria, Ore., area. One day without out the phone, I could handle.

A week without it, that's a different story.

We were two hours away from home when I discovered I didn't have the phone. I thought I had brought it, but after searching the truck, it was nowhere to be found.

I used my fishing buddy Doug Jewett's phone to call home, where my wife Terri could not find my phone anywhere. Again, there was more than a little concern.

Time to mentally retrace my steps. Which I did as we drove down I-5 toward Longview.

The only place we had stopped, other than the gas station where we took on fuel, and some caffeine, was at an outhouse near the dam at Riffe Lake.

"Do you think it could have fallen out of your pocket in the outhouse," Doug asked.

"I guess so," I answered. "But you think I would have heard it clattering on the seat or floor."

Forty minutes later, after turning around and heading all the way back to the outhouse I opened the door in hopes the phone would be sitting there, on the floor, or next to the seat. When I didn't find it there, I did the next obvious thing. I looked down into the slurry inside the bowels of the beast.

I wanted to find my phone, but I didn't want to find it in there. Yet, there it was. Or, I thought there it was.

A shiny black corner of what looked like a phone was poking out of the muck.

"I think I see it," I said to Doug as I went back to the boat to get some long-handled, needle-nose pliers I keep there.

Doug looked inside the toilet and said, "Looks like a phone to me."

Now, before you get all judgy, or grossed out, know that I’m not one of those people. I eat food that's fallen on the floor, never have ever used hand sanitizer, even during COVID.

So, I plucked the phone out of the muck, identified it as mine, saw that it was on, and working just fine. So, I wiped it down and stuck it in my pocket, and off we went, none the worse for wear.

By the way, it seems dropping phones in outhouse toilets is not as rare as it might seem. Recently a woman in the Olympic National Forest dropped her phone in an outhouse and got stuck going down through the hole to retrieve it.

Firefighters had to be called to help extract her, and hopefully her phone, from her predicament.

After the woman fell into the outhouse while trying to retrieve her phone, multiple online forums popped up covering what a person should do with a phone dropped into a port-a-potty or outhouse.

"I think you shouldn't have your phone in your hand while using the toilet. Concentrate on one thing at a time," one commenter wrote.

"I don't know about you, but in my mind there's no choice. Money don't grow on trees any more. I’m diving in after that sucker and I’m not coming up until I find it!" another said.

"You can clean that phone as many times as you want but you’ll never forget the moment you fished that phone off the top of a pile of urine, toilet paper and dung, every time you so much as touch that thing," an additional poster said.

True that. I look at my phone frequently, and sometimes think about where it has been, and then I use it to call or text someone, or look at the fish counts.

That is, I do that when I don't forget it at home.

Rob Phillips is an award-winning freelance outdoor writer who has written the Northwest Sportsman column for more than 30 years. He can be reached at [email protected].

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