We were walking now in the woods in the dark, and heavy rain had come on, and we thought we were on a foot-trail and were not, and we got into a lamentable jungle of devastated pines and wild undergrowth and water. We walked in a circle, we tore our clothes afresh, we climbed pitiably slowly over stark dead jagged trees and branches, and Vachel forgot the subject of Roosevelt and of oratory, and began to make many suggestions as to the right direction. We got so desperate that I said to him:
“You think you know the way. Go ahead, I’ll follow.”
He wouldn’t do that.
“All right: you follow me. And no suggestions for twenty minutes. We’re going to get out of here.”
We then plunged into a waste of tightly-packed willow trees, all about ten feet high, with branches thickly interlaced. It was intensely dark, and they soused us with water at every step. It was like breast-stroke swimming through them. We came to a pine-tree island in the midst of them, and then after a long struggle forward, as I thought, we came back to the same pine trees. Then Vachel said, “Let us just lie down here for the night. When morning comes it will be easier.”
But the ground under us was in slops of water, and rather than sit and shiver there for hours I was all for getting out, and still believed it possible. This faith or stubbornness was at length rewarded, for we came to the water at the top of Lake McDermot, and it was nothing to us to walk through thigh-deep water for half a mile and ford the river. We were so soaked with the water of the willows that we must have made the lake a little wetter.
So we made our way to the palatial hotel which is situated on the north-eastern corner of Lake McDermot. Bedraggled, hanging in new tatters and with water streaming into little pools on the floor when we stood still, we were no people for the hotel. And we read on the front door, “No one in hobnails or bradded shoes allowed to enter here.” The many lights shone on our red faces for a minute, and then we passed on—to the log-cabins of the campers and the hob-nailed brethren. And there we got a room, and we opened our last can of pork and beans and ate it to the bottom, and we rung out our streaming clothes and hung them to dry, and we put Roosevelt and Bryan to sleep, and the poet and the Guardsman were hushed.
The joke was on us and Nature laughed at us,
She laughed at us, she would not help us.