How melancholy an affair it is! You learn on that last day just how dear to you have become the weather-beaten old tents, the groups of shaggy birches, the spikey firs, the stoney break-neck path creeping down to the water's edge, over which you scrambled and growled so audibly at on dark nights when the boys forgot to hang the smoky old lantern down at the landing. The water itself that swashes up on the beach or that has sung you to sleep these many nights as it dashed about against the granite shores.
You look with a heartache at the big black circle out in the open. It is the dead camp fire about which you have spent numberless jolly evenings when Joe sang those rattling good songs of his to a banjo accompaniment, and you all joined in the chorus. You don't remember on this last day all those miserable dinners without fresh meat; those dry teas when you longed so for fruit and tomatoes; those plaguey flies; that haunting dread of finding a snake in your bed every night. You forget how intensely you suffered from sunburn the first week, or how stuffy the gray blankets smelt after a shower, and how the tent always leaked right over the corner where your stretcher stood.
You have grown attached to the tin tableware that disgusted you so at the first meal “out”; the thick delf breakfast cups; the pewter spoons; the flabby butter, and the oilcloth table cover. You have grown attached even to Joe in those awful clothes of his, and when you get back to town and see him rushing down to the office in his gray tweed suit, dazzling boots, stiff felt hat and “boiled” collar, you long for just one glimpse of him in that atrocious get-up he went around in “up north.” Those awful shorts that were once white flannel, that glaringly striped shirt, that black and red blazer, that thing he called a hat, and those beggarly tans over stockings with bush-made open work up the calves!
You go to church the first Sunday you are in town, and across the aisle sits Jennie, prinked up in a French challie trimmed with velvet, a flower garden on her head, and gloves on those dear little hands you helped to brown the day you and she went fishing alone up the river. And then this object that is propped up in the pew like a fashion plate fades slowly away, and you see her as she was last week “up north,” perched on a rock, with her heels hanging down a good half foot below a jaunty sailor dress of blue serge and white braid. It is open at the throat with a big silk tie knotted under the Byron collar, and her pretty little face with its sun-kissed nose laughs out at you from under a scarlet Tam o'Shanter.
Yes, the last day of the season is gloomy. Some of the boys are taking down the tents while you are packing your trunk full of the worst looking togs, the dingiest flannels, the half dry bathing suit, three pairs of terrible looking shoes (they will do again for next year, you tell yourself), a hammock, some bath towels, a Tam, a fore-and-aft, a cow's breakfast, a gray check jocky, and a striped flannel that matches your blazer.
How happy you have all been here together! and how you hate to part from the crowd you never knew were half such delightful people. Some way or other you never cared much for them in town, and when you heard they were to join the party you were disappointed, and said, “Pshaw—they'll never ring in with the rest of us, they are not a bit Bohemian.” Belle was not on your calling list, Jack you never really liked, old Hal you always considered stupid, Joe was undoubtedly “stuck on himself,” and you often wondered why Mrs. A. was allowed to live, and to-day here you are trying to swallow the choke in your throat at the thought of parting with all the gay, careless, unselfish crowd that forgot to bring their style, and their tempers, and their little faults when they came out to the backwoods for those three lazy, care-free weeks.
If you are a woman you kiss all your kind when the good-byes come, and you call the men “old boy,” and your hand rests a little tenderly in Jack's while you look into his half-pathetic eyes, and forget how you railed against him at the ball last winter and called him a “boor” because he neglected to observe some trifling piece of etiquette. If you are a man you wish you might kiss all the girls, and you grasp the fellow by one shoulder with one hand while you shake and shake and shake again with the other and say “good-bye old man, take care of yourself. Yes, I'll be sure to be up Thanksgiving Day.”
Yes, you have had a good time during those three weeks far away from the work-a-day world that you so gladly forgot, so willingly left leagues and leagues behind you. Was not your tent infinitely better than the ten by twelve box your fashionable married sister was occupying down on the Jersey Coast, where she coaxed you so hard to join her? Were not your coarse blankets outspread on aromatic cedar boughs a thousand time superior to a stuffy berth in a hot sleeper or steam boat? Were not these waters singing through the northern night, more musical, wilder, freer than the conventional orchestra playing upon the strand, where men and women in hot, tight habiliments paraded their wealth, and danced, and strolled? Were not you the happier lying there garmented in your collarless flannels, unhampered with gew-gaws or gossip with only heaven's stars above you and the virgin world about you? And that little canoe of yours lying out on the shore ready to be packed for shipment, was it not worth all the carriages at a fashionable watering place? Was your paddle not more precious than steaming, harness-hampered horses, the gunwales curving lines more shapely than a lumbering victoria or a nobby two-wheeler? Were not the freshening windy airs that caught the sail and swept you in your slender craft down the lake, more glorious and entrancing than the clouds of yellow dust whirled from wheels laboring through the heat and crowds that throng a seaside “drive”?
Ah! that treasured canoe that you have had such a struggle over packing, you will never undergo that ordeal again, you tell yourself—particularly if you are a lady, and I agree with you.
It is a nice thing to be a lady canoeist. All the men in camp revere you, and if you are a very good paddler they may do you the honor of imposing on you. You may be proud of yourself, and of your knowledge of boat building and A.C.A. rules and racers and cruisers, but the girls who never paddle but loll gracefully with their backs to the bow, while they play the mandolin and look tender things across the center thwart, have much the best time of it, and somehow they always have the best cushions, while you are expected to kneel on a slidy oilcloth affair about as thick as a knife blade, keeping your temper angelic and serene the while, just because you are strong in the wrists, not afraid of work and blisters and can paddle as well as your brothers.
There are two occasions when you are in demand, the first is, when the lazy man of the party wants an outing. It is astonishing with what rapid growth his affection for you springs forth into flower, although it apparently was not even budding at last night's hop, for he never once came near you. The second time your popularity dawns upon you is when a long cruise is on the programme, and you are sought by every masculine member of the camp, and the honor of your company begged, nay, supplicated for. Then you are demoniac enough to single out the “youngster,” (they always stand by you, those dear, athletic college boys, who admire your skinny, muscular arms, and turn up their noses at the plump whiteness “rolled like dough” as they tell you on the arms of the non-paddling maidens), and then the men get miffed and say “it's hanged curious how a pretty boy gets on with women.”
Yes, they always stand by you—unless you have a canoe to pack, and then—well! Nobody is your friend then. I will never forget an experience I had when a party of twenty struck camp after a month's outing in the wilds of Muskoka. At that time I thought it of vital importance that a canoe should be canvas covered before those infidel train hands touched the sacred thing, but I learned in one bitter lesson how utterly a baggageman despises and ill-treats a canvas packed boat.
I had spent an entire morning sewing that satanic cover, the packing needle was as big as a butcher's skewer, and the twine full of knots. Every time I would get a hole bored in the canvas I would have to seize the needle with both hands, brace myself against the gunwale, and pull, and drag, and get red in the face before the blessed eye with its big double rope would get through, then it would stick. I would go around to the other side of the canoe and find the double twine twisted up into a four-cord warranted not to be untangled cable. Then I would catch hold of the flat part of the needle and turn it round and round until the cord straightened somewhat, then I would shove the rear end of the needle with one thumb and keep the cord taut with the other. By this time I was getting hot, my hands puffing out with a thousand pulses superinduced by hard labor, moisture, and an awakening temper. My hand shook, my thumb slipped, and that demonical skewer contrivance ripped up the back of my knuckles already blistered and tender with sunburn. By this time one or two of the girls had come around to watch the proceeding, saying blandly, “How nice it is to know so much about canoeing, why you're just as good at it as one of the boys, but hurry up, the steamer will be going in a second.”
I was hurrying, my lacerated fingers were doing their best at that wretched canvas, but after a while I got the bow deck all stitched in then I confronted the stern, only to discover the canvas about six inches short. I stretched, and tugged, and boiled, and blessed until I got the stuff to meet—alas! I had left my cord and needle at the bow, the girls had gone, but were shouting again for me to “hurry up” or I'd be left. I dashed down to the other end, grasped the villianous butcher skewer, stretched the canvas once more and began to stitch. After ten minutes of misery I got it sewed up. Then for tying the stuff over the gunwales and thwarts. The cord that seemed like a hangman's rope to sew with, broke like a thread at the first tie. The girls still urged me from the wharf to “make haste.” I reeled off about six yards of string, doubled it twice, and started at the tying business again. As I broke it from the ball the latter rolled lazily off the sands into the lake. I stopped, grabbed a paddle, fished it out—a flabby wet roll of Satan's own netting material. At last I got the thing all fixed, and began to strap the paddles under the thwarts, the steamer was tooting, the girls still shouting, and the sailors were coming for my canoe. They greeted me with, “Hurry up miss,” and I glared at them.
“You can go without me,” I growled, “or anything else you like. I've got to fix these paddles or I don't go aboard.” They looked surprised, but stood back—and watched me. My hands b******* f. The wet string flabbed up and stuck to every thing it touched while I was tying the paddles to the center thwart. The edge of a blade got fast under the rim of the bottom boards. The two men still stood and looked, and I fumed and trembled, and tied and twisted, finally standing erect and telling them to—“Now then”—
The steamer whistled again, the sailors shouldered my canoe, and we all scrambled aboard, while the people on deck hung over the rail staring at my hot face and bleeding fingers, and the women and men of my party jabbered a lot of stuff about “My! but you nearly got left.” I was sweltering hot, tired, furiously ill-tempered, and my back ached, and for all this annoyance I was rewarded thus:
After we had left the steamer the camping outfit was stowed away in a baggage car, and we railed it eighty miles before we reached home. I then went to the car to identify my canoe. What should greet my horrified eyes but my beautiful canvas-packed darling beneath two commercial traveler's iron bound sample trunks, three stretchers, a box of tins, a crate of blueberries, two valises, a baby carriage, a bunch of lacrosse stocks, four bales of blankets, a basket of house plants and a bicycle.
The baggagemen were unloading, and when they excavated my canoe they lifted it out without removing the crate of blueberries. One man got down on the platform and took the bow, the fiend in the car held the stern until they got it pretty well out, then it slipped, he dropped it and the whole concern plumped down with a bang on the boards five feet below.
The jar staggered the man at the bow, so he dropped his hold with a bang number two. I ejaculated a phrase not strictly feminine.
“It's all right, miss,” said the idiot in the car. “It's packed an' nothing'll hurt it.”
But something had hurt it. It had to be white leaded and have a patch nine by five inches inserted where those diabolical baggagemen had “stove” it in.
I have never covered a canoe since then, I never will again. Ship a canoe bare and bald and the train hands will be cautious and regard it as something to be handled with care, but stretch a web of canvas over it and they think it is clothed in a coat of mail impenetrable as Fate.