We borrowed our tent from the Hickory Bend Outing Club that Paw belongs to back home. The poles go along the fenders and stick out a good way behind. I could always cook without a stove, from experience at picnics when I was younger. The dishes goes in a box. Paw nailed a rack on top of the fenders, and we carry a lot of stuff that way. Cynthy always has her suitcase on the outside because it's the newest one. The other girls set on the bedding on the rear seat, and I ride in front with Paw. We mostly wear overalls.
Yes, times has changed, says Maw.
As a dispassionate observer in one of our national parks, expressing the belief in modern speech, I'll say they have. I have met Maw this summer, ninety thousand of her, concentrated on a piece of mountain scenery about fifty miles square—Maw on her first vacation in a life of sixty years. Dear old Maw!
Ninety thousand replicas of Maw cause the rest of us to eat copiously of alkaline dust and to shiver each time we approach a turn on the roads of Yellowstone Park, which were laid out on a curling iron. You cannot escape seeing Paw and Maw, and Cynthy in her pants, and Hattie and Roweny in overalls and putties. I have seen their camp fire rising on every remaining spot of grass on all that busy fifty miles. I have photographed Maw and Cynthy and the other girls, and Cynthy has photographed me because I looked funny. Bless them all, the whole ninety thousand of them—I would not have missed them on their vacation this summer for all the world. They are, I suppose, what we call the new people of America, who never have been out like this before. They've been at home. Maw has been getting the Sunday dinner. Paw has been plowing, paying the taxes which this Government has spent for him. But now Paw pays income tax also; and both he and Maw construe this fact to mean that they can at last read their title clear to a rest, and a car, and a vacation. So they have swung out from the lane at last, after forty years of work, and on to the roads that lead to the transcontinental highway. They have crossed the prairies and come up into the foothills—the price of gas increasing day by day, and Paw kicking but paying cash—and so they have at last arrived among the great mountains of which Maw has dreamed all her long life of cooking and washing and ironing.
Studies in Mountain Pants
I shall not inquire by what miracle of grace Paw has learned to find his way about on these curling-iron mountain roads. I am content to eat a barrel of dust a day rather than miss the sight of Maw, placid and bespectacled, on the front seat of the flivver. Without her the mountain roads would never be the same for me, and my own vacation would be spoiled. Frankly, I am in love with Maw; and as for Cynthy in her pants——
Times has changed. Maw also wears pants today. She says that they are convenienter when she sits down round on the grass. Sometimes her pants are fastened round the ankles with large and shiny safety pins, apparently saved from the time when Jimmy was a baby. Sometimes they hang straight down au naturel, and sometimes they stop at the knee—in which case, as Maw's au naturel is disposed to adipose—they make a startling adjunct to the mountain scenery. But, bless her heart, Maw doesn't care! She is on her way and on her vacation, the first in all her life. There rest on her soul the content and poise which her own square and self-respecting mind tells her are due her after forty years of labor, including the Lord's Days thereof. I call Maw's vacation her Lord's Day. It ought to be held a sacred thing by all who tour our national parks, where Maw is gregariously accumulated in these days. I used to own this park, you and I did. It's Maw's park now. Forty years of hard work!
Has she earned a vacation? I'll say she has. Is she taking it? I'll say she is.
Maw has company in the park—not always just the company she or I would select, were it left to us. Some of these do not go out by motor car. Of course Abe Klinghammer, of the Plasterers' Union, Local Number Four, being rich, goes out by rail on a round trip. He can go to the tents and log cottages of the Camps Company. He does not kick any more than Maw kicks. To tell the truth, in spite of the front he throws, Abe is a little bit scared at all this sudden splendor in his life. He is a little uneasy about how to act, how to seem careless about it, as though he had been used to it all his life. Abe takes it out in neckties. Having bought a swell one of four colors and inserted a large cameo in it, he loses his nerve and begins to doubt whether he is getting by. You will always see Abe looking at your necktie.