IN THE OUTHOUSE
September 6, 2009At first glance, four years ago, Gary Moody seemed as though he might be the most dedicated husband in the universe. Caught submerged in the business-end of an outhouse on the Kancamagus Highway in Northern New Hampshire, he claimed he was looking for his wife’s wedding ring, which had somehow been dropped into the pool of waste. Further, or should I say, deeper, investigation revealed that Mr. Moody had been voluntarily submerged in the man-made tide pool for less honorable reasons. Let’s call it a fetish gone awry, he was catching glimpses of the underside of unwary travelers. Witness statements brought the unsavory story into broad daylight.
Naturally, at the time, the story made national news. How is it that New Hampshire seems always to host criminal behavior that transcends even national stories? That is no small feat, in this day and age. As a native, I am always singing the virtues of our fine state, and then… Anyone who reads a newspaper or has seen the Gay parade in San Francisco knows that you really have to have your thinking cap on to break the glass ceiling of abhorrent behavior that as a nation we have become, sadly, used to.
We used to call New York the “City That Never Sleeps” and offers something for everyone. Since then, we have become the country that never sleeps and offers something for everyone, with the possible exception of normal people who, as far as I know, want only a degree of normalcy in their surrounding life. It’s getting hard to find.
Gary Moody escaped jail time on his first offense and one could argue that his ridicule in the public eye may have been punishment enough. That argument, however, would have been laid moot this week as Mr. Moody was once again caught satisfying his urge for snorkeling in yet another outhouse in the White Mountain National Forest. The excuse this time? He dropped his shirt down there. He went on to say, probably realizing that Jay Leno would need more than that for a monologue, that he had used his shirt to “wipe the seat, because those toilet seats are filthy…”. Odd, the desire for sanitary conditions, followed almost immediately by a shallow swan dive into a place that most of us don’t want to look at, much less swim in.
It’s not all funny, though. Mr. Moody is clearly a deeply disturbed man and one must wonder how far he is from being a dangerous, disturbed man. This most recent event occurred at the Hastings Campground in Gilead, Maine, just a few miles from the New Hampshire border. A woman first smelled trouble when her niece reported that there was “something going on in the outhouse”. That claim raised a few eyebrows, but minutes later, when the same woman went in to check on her 9-year old son, the toilet suddenly lifted from the floor, and up popped Mr. Moody, out of the waste vault, saying simply, “Sorry, I was getting my shirt.” Okey Dokey.
I hesitate to use the old adage that he may be in deep s**t this time, because he now has three Federal charges against him. In the 2005 case, Northern Carroll Country Judge Pamela Albee remarked that he “deserved compassion”, and he does. However, so does the travelling public, and the women and children whose privacy was violated in the most unlikely of places.
There is something unsettling that even in the remote woods of the glorious North Country, we should now peer down drain pipes to check for visitors before utilizing a public restroom.
One might think that with the endless supply and infinite categories of pornography that is available nearly everywhere, comprising a multi-billion dollar per year business, that it would no longer be necessary for one to grab their waders and swim fins to go looking for a good time. Or, maybe, it is our allowance of, and the blind eye we turn towards, a truly wretched segment of our culture, that is creating the Gary Moody’s of the world. One thing is for sure, it is yet another sad sign of the moral decay that we have, apparently, accepted as our collective fate.
