Boys of the Old Sea Bed: Tales of Nature and Adventure

by Charles Allen McConnell

In some of the deeper marshes, where there had been an abundance of water for several years, cranberry vines had covered the surface of the moss and yielded astonishing crops of mottled green and red berries. This was the character of much of the land of which Mr. Allen found himself possessed. A granite rock rising with nearly perpendicular sides over three hundred feet above the level surface of the country, gave the name of North Bluff marsh to the locality, as distinguished from the country about a similar bluff some ten miles to the south.

After considerable persuasion on the part of the boys, Mr. Allen had leased this cranberry marsh to Rob and Ed, and their chum Dauphin. The boys already had a good start on the fund they were gathering for a planned year in college, and if they should be successful in getting the berries from the North Bluff to market, it would bring them nearer to the desired goal.

While the cranberry, as it is picked from the vine, is as firm and meaty as a little apple, it bruises easily in handling, and so requires great care in getting to market. The boys had purposed using two-bushel grain sacks for the transportation of the crop, but Mr. Allen wisely persuaded them to make a preliminary trip to Lisbon and secure light ash barrels to take with them to the marsh and so prevent much loss from bruised and damaged berries.

On the twentieth of August the boys had their outfits assembled: two yokes of oxen hitched to two broad-tired wagons, upon which were long racks each containing thirty empty barrels. With these they carried a tent, cooking utensils, supplies of bacon, flour, brown sugar, matches, axes, guns, and ammunition, sacks to carry the berries from the marsh to dry land, and not least in importance, three cranberry rakes. Of these latter Uncle Sam Thompson had made one for each of the boys. A slab of ash was taken and fingers about ten inches long sawn and whittled down smooth in one end. Sides and back were put to this, with a handle on top and back. With these “rakes” the boys would literally scoop up the berries from the vines.

The trip of fifty miles to the marsh was, in itself, a great undertaking. There were no roads; logs and tree roots had to be chopped out of the way, and overhanging limbs cleared from before the stacks of barrels. More serious were the occasional deep bogs encountered, through which the oxen, though accustomed to wallowing in mud, were unable to pull the wagons. Over these the boys were obliged to build a “corduroy,” sometimes for several rods. To one accustomed to a boulevard or even a macadam pike, the corduroy would seem an impossibility as a means of travel, but pioneers are frequently required to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Small trees are felled and cut into lengths suitable to the width of the wagon, and these placed side by side until the way across has been covered. When the marsh is unusually deep and soft, a second layer of smaller logs is placed upon the first. It is not a good road, nor easy to ride over, but it can be crossed, and that is the main thing.

Not alone were the bad roads, or lack of roads, a cause of distress to the boys and their teams; mosquitoes in clouds attacked them day and night. Frequently they were compelled to make “smudges” of fire covered with green grass, so that in the smoke they might be able to eat their meals in some sort of comfort. At night the oxen were likewise protected from the attacks of the pestiferous insects. Much annoyance and no little suffering were caused by a spotted fly, called from its markings, the “deer fly,” which persistently crawled up into their hair and under their clothing, its bite always drawing blood.

The boys averaged not quite five miles a day on the trip, and it was the last day of August before the camping place at the foot of North Bluff was reached.

The first day of their arrival was spent in arranging camp; putting up the tent, digging the shallow well in the sand at the marsh’s edge, and building moss-lined pole-pens in which to store the berries as they should be picked. Cranberry harvest and the arrival of frost are usually too close together to allow any time to be taken away from the one occupation of picking. So the boys would sort over and clean the berries and then barrel them after the frosts had come.

The bog was a wonder to the Allen boys. Around the edge, for perhaps ten rods out into the marsh, were growing tamarack trees, from little switches a dozen feet high that could be easily pulled up by hand, to older ones six inches in diameter, and thirty feet in height. Further out, beyond the line of tamaracks, the bog looked much like a prairie covered with moss, with here and there a sandy mound upon which blackberry vines, huckleberry bushes, and a few scattering pine trees were growing.

When they had walked out into the marsh several rods over shoe-top deep in the moss, Dauphin called out, “Stand still a minute, boys, I want to show you something,” and he began to spring up and down in rhythmic motion. In a few moments, at first slightly, then in increasing motion the trees began to sway and bend, and the surface of the bog, for many rods around, could be seen in regular, wave-like motion, trees and all rising and falling, bending and rolling as if on the bosom of a rolling sea.