All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years younger already.
The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:
Silence!—No admission without
authority—No smoking!
*** MORTON'S MISERY FARM ***
30 acres of swamp—Our own rock
quarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry
Harshest dietary laws in the
Catskills
A small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky, well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.
"Read and sign, shnook!" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate.
The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away.
Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garments we had seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear.