Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

Ruth smiled. “You would get sand in your sneakers.”

“Sneakers!” I scoffed.

“And wear holes in your silk stockings.”

“Silk stockings! No one should wear stockings out here. They should run barefoot before the wind, and leap from peak to peak. It is absurd, in the face of this vast emptiness, to wear clothes at all!”

“So many people feel that way,” said Ruth, dryly.

But I refused to be rebuffed.

“We need it, Ruth,” I cried. “We, who are cooped up in cities, are starving for this very thing—space and sunlight, air and warmth. Not the suffocating heat of the area-ways, but the glow that glances off the sun-kissed sand. Our eyes are blind with gray pavements and white asphalt, stone and cement, nothing but colors as hard as the substance we tread on. We hunger for blue and for purple, for the sea and the seacoast shadows, for green that is brighter than burnt sod, and for living red and yellow. The craving for earth under our feet is still natural to us. It is what has made possible the barefoot cult of the people who choose to get up in the morning and run around in the dew, and the ‘back to all fours’ cult of those who put their hands down on the floor and prance like a trained bear. And the ‘stand on your head’ cult, who pick out a cushion which best suits their psychic soul and balance themselves with their feet in the air for hours at a time. Perhaps it is true that it is stimulating to the brain. But Ruth, joking aside, there must be a fundamental reason for all of this ‘simple life’ movement—the elemental need for relaxation, which is what this sort of exercise gives to the worn human machine. I am going to give up my apartment in New York and pitch a tent on the sand-dunes!”

Ruth laughed.

I thought that probably she would point out to me how impractical I was. But she did not. She seemed to be weighing the matter, taking me more seriously than I took myself. Ruth had a penetrating quality of sympathy with another’s trouble that made of it an immediate problem for her to solve and for the sufferer to relinquish. I had come up here a week ago, for no other reason than that life had reached the stage with me where I had to run away from the confusion of my own ménage. I needed another line of vision, another angle from which to approach it, and I considered it worth taking the long dull journey up the cape to get my friend’s point of view. All that quiet August afternoon, while we had watched her children playing on the sand-dunes, we had been talking over life and our place in it as only two women can who had known each other since childhood and have managed to keep friends, although both of them are married. Our conversation had been mostly about New York, from which I was escaping, and that offshoot of society which has its roots among actors and producers and its branches in the motion-picture studios. Ruth was far removed from this forcing frame, spending her winters, more happily, in Charleston, and her summers on Cape Cod, so that I thought I could get from her the calm point of view and the fresh focus that I needed.

“Well, if you want to live here and get back to nature by way of the sand-dunes, by all means do so,” she was saying dispassionately; “that would be saner than running on all fours and standing on your head in the city. But don’t pitch a tent out here! It has been demonstrated that hurricanes have an antipathy for canvas. Buy a house in town, and at least have shingles over your head and running water in the kitchen. Even the birds refuse to drink from the rank pools in this desert. There is alkali on the surface and quicksands along the edges of the ponds. I’ll show you a house in Star Harbor that has been waiting for years for some one like you to come along and take a chance on moving into it.”