Two Whole Glorious Weeks

A new author, and a decidedly unusual idea of the summer camp of the future: hard labor, insults, and hog kidneys!
Bertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows, under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your belly-button.
It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.
We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper. They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said Looky there! and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they wore— Just like convicts, she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency brake and wheeled around at us then.
You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!
All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years younger already.
The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read: