Maw's Vacation by Emerson Hough (ebook reader android .TXT) 📖

year I shall again see Maw leaning against a big pine, as she sits upon the ground drinking real handmade coffee of her own from a tin cup with the handle cut so it will nest down in the box. Maw's meals do not cost her four bits a throw, because they brought things along. Paw catches a trout sometimes on the cane pole that hangs alongside the car; not always, but sometimes, he catches one. And Maw, once she had conquered the notion that you ought to skin a trout the way you do a bullhead back in Ioway, took to cooking trout naturally; and her trout, with pancakes and sirup, to my notion beat anything the hotel chef in the best hotel can do. Maw does not worry about a room with bath, though sometimes when the rain comes through the old wall tent she gets both. The pink and green war paint which you sometimes see beneath Maw's specs when you meet her on the road represents only the mark of the bedquilts, where the colors were not too proud to run.

Maw finds it wonderful in these mountains. I know she does, because she has never yet told me so. Maw throws no fits. But many a time I have seen her sitting, in the late afternoon, her hands, in the first idleness they have known in all her life, lying in her ample lap, her faded eyes quietly gazing through her steel-bowed far-lookers at the vast pictures across some valley she has found. It is her first valley of dreams, her first valley of rest and peace and quiet. The lights on these hills are such as she did not see in Ioway, or even in Nebraska, when she went there once, time Mary's baby was born. The clouds are so strange to Maw, their upturned edges so very white against the black body of their over-color. And the rains that come, with hail—but here you don't need worry, for there are no crops for the hail to spoil. And sometimes in the afternoon, never during the splendor of the mellow morning such as Maw never before has seen, comes the lightning and rips the counterpane of clouds to let the sun shine through.

I know Maw loves it all, because she never has told me so. She is very shy about her new world in this new day. She wouldn't like to talk about it. We never do like to talk about it, once we really have looked out across our valley of dreams.

You can't fail to like Hattie and Rowena and Cynthy. Often I walk with Cynthy and her Vassarrority on the Angel Terrace, when the moon is up, when it is all white, and Cynthy is almost the only angel left there. Such a moon as the Interior Department does provide for the summer here! I defy any Secretary of any other Department—War, Navy, Commerce, Labor or anything—to produce any such moon as this at six dollars and fifty cents a day with bath; or four dollars and fifty cents a day with two towels; or four bits a day at Maw's camp on the Madison. So though I know Cynthy would prefer the young park ranger—who really is the son of a leading banker in Indianapolis—to explain the algae and the Algys, I do the best I can at my age of life with Cynthy.

Rowena, the younger, seventeen now, who wears hers with spirals, tells me that Cynthy keeps a diary, because she herself found it in the tool box. “And once,” says Rowena to me, “Cynthy, after coming into camp from a walk through the moonlit pines, wrote in her diary: 'August 12, 11 p. m. Trout for supper. Walked with —— toward the Hymen Terrace, just beyond Jupiter Hill, I think it is called. The moon wonderful what woman is there who has not at some time in her life longed to be swept off her feet by some Strong Man!'”

I copy this as Rowena did, punctuation and all. Rowena has not yet gone to Vassar.

Cynthy is the one who thinks the family ought to have a six-cylinder car next year, with seats that lie back, and air mattresses. Maw does not agree with her, and says that four cylinders are plenty hard enough for Paw to keep clean. By what marvel Cynthy is always so stunning; and Hattie so nurselike in denim and white; and Rowena always so neat in hers with spirals, which she bought ready made at the store for seven dollars and fifty-two cents—I cannot say; but when I see these marvels I renew my faith in my country and its people, even though I do wish that Paw would pause at some geyser and have a Sunday shave. He says he forgot his razor and left it home.

In the Grip of the Law

Speaking of room with bath, Maw solved the ablutionary problem for herself the other day at Old Faithful Ranger Station. The young men who make up the ranger force there have built a simple shanty over the river's brim, which they use as their own bathhouse. As there is no sentinel stationed there Maw thought it was public like everything else. She told me about it later.

“I went in,” said she, “and seen what it was. There was a long tub and a tin pail. There was a trapdoor in the floor that was right over the river. I reached down and drew up a pail of water, and it was right cold. Then I seen a turn faucet, end of a pipe that stuck out over the tub. It brought in some right hot water that come up within six feet of the door. It didn't take me long to figure that this was the hot-water faucet. So there was hot and cold water both right on the spot, and I reckon there ain't no such natural washtub as that in all Ioway. I got me a wash that will last me a long while. There wasn't no towels, and so I took my skirt. Now, Cynthy——”

But Cynthy was writing notes in her diary. All college girls write notes in diaries, and sometimes they take to free verse. Of course writing in a diary is only a form of egotism, precisely like writing on a geyser formation. They both ought to be illegal, and one is. Maw knows all about that. Sometimes, even now, she will tell me how she came to be fined by the United States commissioner at Mammoth Hot Springs.

“So Maw, dear, old, happy, innocent Maw, knelt down with her hatpin and wrote:”—p. 19

You see, the geysers rattled Maw, there being so many and she loving them all so much. One day when they were camped near the Upper Basin, Maw was looking down in the cone of Old Faithful, just after that Paderewski of the park had ceased playing. She told me she wanted to see where all the suds came from. But all at once she saw beneath her feet a white, shiny expanse of something that looked like chalk. At a sudden impulse she drew a hatpin from her hair and knelt down on the geyser cone—not reflecting how long and slow had been its growth.

For the first time a feeling of identity came to Maw. She never had been anybody all her life, even to herself, before this moment on her vacation. But now she had seen the mountains and the sky, and had oriented herself as one of the owners of this park. So Maw, dear, old, happy, innocent Maw, knelt down with her hatpin and wrote: Margaret D. Hanaford, Glasgow, Iowa.

She was looking at her handiwork and allowing she could have done it better, when she felt a touch on her shoulder, and looked up into the stern young face, the narrow blond mustache, of the ranger from Indianapolis. The ranger was in the Engineers of the A. E. F. When Maw saw him she was frightened, she didn't know why.

“Madam,” said the ranger, “are you Margaret D. Hanaford?”

“That's me,” answered Maw; “I don't deny it.”

“Did you write that on the formation?”

Maw could not tell a lie any more than George Washington when caught, so she confessed on the spot.

“Then you are under arrest! Don't you know it's against the regulations to deface any natural object in the park? I'll have to telephone in the number of your car. You must see the commissioner before you leave the park.”

“Me arrested?” exclaimed Maw in sudden consternation. “What'll that man do to me?”

“He'll fine you ten dollars and costs. If you had written it a little bit larger it would have been twenty-five dollars and costs. Now get down and rub it out before it sets, and do it quick, before the geyser plays again.”

And so Maw got down on her knees and rubbed out her first feeling of identity. And the commissioner fined her ten dollars and costs in due time—for Maw was honest as the day and didn't try to evade the punishment that she thought was hers.

“I ought to have knew better,” she said “me, a woman of my years. I don't begretch the money, and I think the young man was right, and so was the judge, and I'll never do it again. The commissioner said that I looked like a woman of sense. I always did have sense before. I think it must be these mountains, or the moon, or something. I never felt that way before.”

It was this young man who walked down to Maw's camp to take her number. It was there that he met Cynthy, and I am inclined to think that she took his number at the time. Later on I often saw them walking together, past the great log hotel with its jazz architecture, and beyond the fringe of pine that separates the camp trippers from the O'Cleaves, who live in the hotels. The young ranger was contrite about arresting Maw, but that latter was the first to exonerate him.

“You only done right,” said she. “I done what I knew was wrong. Now, Hattie, and you, Roweny, don't you let this spoil your trip none at all. It's once your Maw has allowed herself the privilege of being an old fool, the first time in her life. I dunno but it was worth ten dollars, at that.”

And so I suppose we should let Cynthy and the young ranger go out into the moonshine to learn how the algae grow, of how many different colors. Consider the algae of the geysers, how they grow. Solomon in all his glory had nothing on the algae; and the Queen of Sheba nothing on Cynthy.

“—and The Queen of Sheba had nothing on Cynthy.”—p. 22.

Sometimes, even yet, Maw and I talk about the time she was fined ten dollars for writing her name. “It might have been worse,” said she to me. “When we was coming through some place a ways back we heard about a man there that was sentenced to be hung after he had been tried several times. His friends done what they could with the governor, but it didn't come to nothing. So after a while his lawyer come in the jail, and he says: 'Bill, I can't do nothing more for you. On next Monday morning at six o'clock you've got to be hung by the neck until you're dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.' 'Well, all I can say,' says Bill, 'that's a fine way to begin the week, ain't it now?'”

The time she wrote her name upon the geyser will always remain the great event in Maw's