Vacation Camping for Girls

by Jeannette Augustus Marks

I watched them spread the big tent-fly and make it fast. I saw them take out the large packing box, converting that into a table, on which some of the children put flowers in an old bottle; I watched them set out the bench and chairs, swing the hammock, lay the improvised table with the enamel dishes which they took from the little boxes, and, in general, make themselves comfortable.

The children had pails for berries, and they began to pick berries in a business-like fashion. The woman sat in the hammock and took care of the baby—oh, I forgot to mention the baby. The farmer and his lad hitched and unhitched the horses, starting within a few minutes to work with the mowing machine, and leaving two of the horses tethered to a tree. Evidently this was work and a picnic combined—to me a new way of getting in your hay crop. But the more I watched it and thought about it the more I liked it. And their dinner with the berries as dessert—well, I knew just how good, there in the sunshine, with appetites sharpened by work, it must taste to them all.

Inside the cottage shanty of our camp, one member of the household, at least, had been doing her work in quite a different spirit. It seemed to me that there was nothing which this cook, a large, robust woman, with an arm with the strength of five, had not found fault with and made the worst of. Her first groan was heard in the morning at six o’clock—in getting up myself to go to my writing table I had cruelly awakened her—and, of course, as she went to bed only half after seven the night before, she had been robbed of her necessary sleep. As I say, I heard her first groan—the sun was shining gloriously, and I had already had a sun bath and a cold sponge and my morning exercises—while she continued to lie in bed and to make every subsequent groan until after seven o’clock fully audible.

She began that beautiful day and its work in resisting everything. She had never been in such a place before, and a very nice convenient camp we, ourselves, thought it. She groaned while she pumped water—I do not know whether she or the pump made the more noise. She complained loudly because of the mice. Oh, no, she could not set a mouse trap: she had never done such a thing before! And then, when we got a cat, she complained because of the noise the cat made in catching the mice. I do not know precisely what kind of a cat she expected, possibly a noiseless, rubber-tired cat, that would catch noiseless, rubber-tired mice. She would not carry water—even a two-quart pail full—her back was not strong enough. She had never seen such dishes as these we were using, nice, clean enamel ware dishes, with blue borders. She had never heard of such a thing as hanging milk and butter in a well to keep them cool. Dear me, she never even thought of going to such a place where they did not have ice that would automatically cool everything, and which the ice-man kindly handed to her in pieces just the size which she preferred. She said the spring—a beautiful spring whose waters are renowned for their purity and healthfulness much as the waters of Poland Spring are—she said that the spring had pollywogs in it and frogs. She could not string a clothes-line, but stood in tears near the big trunk of a balsam fir, holding the line helplessly in her hands and looking up to the branch not more than two inches above her head. While one of us flung the end of the clothes-line over the branch and made it fast to another she remarked with contempt, sniffing up her tears, that it was not a clothes-line, anyway, which was perfectly true, for it was only a boat cord, but it did quite as well. When she walked down from the meadow, that glorious golden meadow, where the happy family was picnicking and hay-making at the same time, and through which wound a little path down to the spring’s edge, she lifted her skirts as if she were afraid they might be contaminated by the touch of that clean, sweet-smelling, long grass. Still groaning she would fetch about a quart of water. And groaning, still groaning, she went to bed at night “half-dead,” as she expressed it, as the result of about five hours of work, in which she was all the time helped by somebody else.

Of course she was “half-dead.” It is a wonder to me now, as I think of it, that she did not die altogether. Instead of taking things as they were in the sun-filled day, with its keen, crisp air, its wonderful view, instead of feeling something of the beauty and health and sun and wind-swept cleanness of it all, she had resisted every detail of the day, every part of her work, she had, in short, found fault with everything. This day, that would have seemed so joyous to some people, had not meant to her an opportunity to make the best of things and to be grateful for the long sleep, the sunshine, the invigorating air, the beauty, the light work, but merely a chance to make the worst of things, to throw herself against every demand made upon her.

Out in front of the cabin the farmer swept round and round with his mowing machine, his big, glossy horses glistening in the sunshine, the sharp teeth of the machine laying the grass in a wide swath behind him. He seemed peaceful and contented, although it was warm out in the direct sunlight, and the brakes were heavy and the horses needed constant guiding. Down below, nearer the spring, his wife swung in the hammock, and the children picked berries, fetched water, and were gleefully busy. It was a scene of simple contentment with life.

When the father came back for his dinner, which was eaten under the spread of a tent-fly and from the top of a packing box, decorated in the center with flowers and around the edges by contented faces, I said to him: “You seem to be having a jolly time.”

“Why, yes, so we are,” was his reply. “I offered the folks who own this meadow such a small sum of money for the hay crop I didn’t think I’d get it. I thought some one else was sure to offer them more, but I guess they didn’t, for I got it. You see, it’s pretty far away from my farm to come out here haying.”

“And so you make a picnic of it?”