Look to the Mountain

To make a correction right away, Mount Chocorua is not called Conway Mountain in the book - that was my tired eyes misreading.  It is called Coruway Mountain. Perhaps the names were changed to protect the anonymity of the ghostly denizens of the New Hampshire ranges.

I did start reading the book last night and so far, absolutely nothing is familiar. The page I read as a very young child of course I wouldn't expect to recall, but I read the whole book one summer in my teenage years. One of the joys of being in New Hampshire in the summer was the luxury of being bored, and being bored always led to adventures, including a hike up Mount Chocorua with an uncle and some cousins. Debby and I took a solo hike once, when we were of driving age, on Moat Mountain. We set some sort of record of beating the estimated climbing time of maybe an hour and a half, and in fact climbed it up and down in six hours. That was only one of the times we came home late, to the wrath of our grandmother. We couldn't understand parental worry at that age - we were invincible, and we went to bed stifling our giggles. 

Look to the Mountain was published in 1942, when I was two years old, and is the copy I am reading was reprinted in 1994. The earlier printings are surely still sitting on the shelves in summer houses, waiting for a bored teenager to pick them up. And to maybe pick them up again, 55 years later.

Camps

One summer, my aunt and uncle, Barbara and John, went to somewhere exotic, like Bermuda, instead of summering as usual in Conway at Hillacres Farm. They put their two children, Debby and John, into the sister and brother camps, Waukeela and Waunalancet, on Crystal Lake. Even though my sister was there, I was lost without Debby for the summer, and at the same time jealous that she'd gone to camp without me. Still, I knew by a child's keen sense, that she was miserable at camp, and so was Johnny. We four cousins belonged on the farm, together, reading, washing dishes, making daisy chains, picking blueberries and wild strawberries, swimming, playing in the barn, on the swing that our grandfather had hung from the rafters three stories above our heads. There were two notched boards for seats; one for one person and one wider for two. The wider one was the most comfortable for one, we reached our arms out wide for the ropes. There were many things that could be done on that swing. One cousin could twist another, twist the rope all the way to the barn roof, and then the one in the swing would spin unbelievable dizzying for minutes, and then not be able to walk. One cousin could be pushed on the swing; pumping ourselves could never get up to the height that our feet might, if we were brave, touch the barn window over the big wide rolling wooden barn door. Debby and I sat together on the swing and sang, for hours. One of our favorite songs was a translation into French that we had made of Che Sera Sera. We liked songs with repetitive lyrics that we could sing in the car as well, to the despair of the grownups in the front seat. A good one was "He wore black denim trousers and motorcycle boots, a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back." We were not little girls at this point, but budding teens, fascinated with French and with bad boys. Another game the four of us played in the barn was Train in India. The back of the barn had a rolling door too, like the front, but much smaller. Some sumac grew next to that door, and we could sit on the door sill, dangle our feet over the side and pretend we were on a train in India. When we were much smaller, our grandfather parked his station wagon in the barn. He would stop at the house first, to unload whatever purchases he'd come home with, and then sometimes we would be given the magical treat of riding down to the barn in the station wagon. If we wanted to swing, sometimes we'd have to ask that the car be moved.

The summer Debby and Johnny were at camp, Mr. Harper, the man who planted lollipops in the sand at the South Conway Club beach, became Santa Claus for a Christmas in August party in the barn for Debby's birthday. There were lots of girls from Waukeela with Debby, and it felt wrong. Debby and I were, gratefully, to have many more summers to on the top of the mountain.

More reading

Last night I stayed up late and read all of Joan Didion's Blue Nights and it was wonderfully sad and blue and beautiful. She mentioned The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby; I bought it right away and started it today and plan on staying up to finish it tonight. It's not long. I had the movie on my Netflix list for a long time, but it's not now on instant viewing. I have no recollection of why I thought it interesting, for I knew nothing about it. 

It is the most eloquent memoir I can imagine. Bauby, who was editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, had a stroke in December of 1995, at the age of 42. After 20 weeks of coma he came to to find himself in locked-in syndrome, and was able to move only his left eye. With a method called partner-assisted scanning, he used an alphabetic system, with the alphabet reordered to have the most used letters first, whereby he could communicate by blinking when his partner reached the letter he wanted. Through this method, with with the assistance of Claude Mendibil, he was able to dictate the memoir of his illness, letter by letter. Bauby died three days after the publication of his book in March of 1997.

Books

Summer means reading, always. In New Hampshire, there were stacks and stacks and shelves of books everywhere you looked. And the Conway Library was a cool haven - it was a Carnegie library, and felt exactly the same as the one in Baltimore, in San Rafael, in San Anselmo. Going to town always meant a trip to the library. As well as ice cream at Stone the Druggist. Marble library, marble soda fountain, marble museum; marble cooled my childhood summers.

In the living room in New Hampshire, couples were curled up on couches, the rest of the grownups relaxed in chairs, and they all were reading. The four cousins were in the kitchen washing dishes; one to wash, one to rinse, one to dry, one to put away. Inevitably, when we were just finished, the grownups would come in with the tray of coffee cups. There was always a puzzle going in the living room, too, and a windup record player for old 78's. Jonah and the Whale, Mairsy Doats and Dosey Doats, Nebuchadnezzer, and the children in the firey furnace. The first grownup book I read a page of was in that living room - it was Look to the Mountain, and was about the settling of the area in the 1700's. The mountain might have been Moat Mountain. Okay, I've just bought a copy of it from Amazon, so I'll be able to tell you what mountain it was. Back to my early reading: I picked up the book, and turned at random to a page, and sat down and read it. I had no idea what it was about (I wasn't much beyond Fun with Dick and Jane), but I read a whole page, and felt a wondrous accomplishment. 

So I'll catch up here with my 2012 summer reading. I finished the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, and loved it. I did catch on to the atheist allusions, but as with many athiest writings, I came away with a sense of awe for something that is even more mysterious than I thought before. Then I read Prince of Tides, which was powerful and dark and brutal and lovely. That one came to me as an example of writing memoir as fiction. It's a fascinating concept. I just got Joan Didion's Blue Nights from the Murphys Library and started reading it earlier this evening. Another memoir book, of course. I hope I haven't already forgotten any books that I've read in the past month.

A book find for Kindle readers: bookbub.com An email a day brings me many free or nearly free books. It's an embarrassment of wealth.

What books will I take with me? What will the Burbank Library be like? 

ps I mailed in my signed lease and check for the first month's rent plus small deposit and I bought moving boxes and tape and paper.

Sherwood Forest

This photo was definitely taken before 1949 or '50, when my family bought a house in Sherwood Forest, on the Severn River in Maryland. But I'd bet it was taken only ten or 15 years before. It's only the clothes of some of the subjects that show the time a little. The porch could have easily been our house, and the rocking chair couple could have been my mother and father.

We went to Sherwood Forest instead of to New Hampshire, where we'd spent every summer since 1938, the year my sister was born.  Neither Lucy nor I was in favor of the idea, since Conway was home to us. (I think the other day I said Center Conway by mistake. Center Conway was our mailing address, but we were really in South Conway, and the beach with the lollipops was the South Conway Club. This writing experience is showing up all kinds of holes in my memory.) But my mother had been ill, my grandfather had recently died, and Sherwood Forest was close to Baltimore, where my father worked. He could spend all the summer with us, and not just a few weekends. 

Sherwood Forest was a kind of a family camp, but with houses rather than tents. There was golf, swimming, sailing, dances, cocktail parties for the grownups, and a full schedule of sports and games for the children. Lucy truly didn't like organized activity by then and got a job in the little snack store. I didn't like the feel of the program either, but I can't recall why. The golf was kind of dumb, my group felt, so we played one hole, and on the basis of those scores made up the rest and went to the snack shop, whose name is almost on the tip of my tongue. The swimming was interesting, since the Severn is full of stinging jellyfish. They're not fatal, but a good sting would raise welts and put an end to the day's fun. The swimming area was netted and that kept most of the jellyfish out, but we all got stung sometimes. 

Lucy and I shared a room on a bottom floor, and it was reached by a ladder, so grownups rarely came down. We were thus able to keep a horde of forbidden comic books that we bought sometimes instead of candy. My father would drop a board down the ladder to wake us up. Rude or funny? I could never tell. My grandmother came to visit for a week or two, and we all played Canasta every night. I can't remember how to play now, but it must be a good game to captivate a family from 10 years old to 60 or so. My grandmother's age was always just old. I wonder if my grandchildren think of me that way now.

There were only two Sherwood Forest summers, and then we returned to New Hampshire as before. Hill Acres Farm was the name of the revolutionary war farm that my grandfather had bought from the last living Littlefield. I wish he'd named it Littlefields, but I wasn't born yet and couldn't express my opinion. New Hampshire was where we belonged, with aunts and uncles and cousins.

Baltimore Museum of Art

I asked my sister why she didn't go to Camp Whippoorwill. She said, "You know, I was the one who was not supposed to like organized activities." That says a lot about us, the labeling of people even at that early age, in our family and in the 40's and 50's world in general. I was always labeled the opposite of whatever was her label of the day, thus I did get to enjoy lots of organized activities, not knowing that maybe my sister might like to as well. We did very little together, although we were only two years apart. 

But she reminded me that we did go together to the Baltimore Museum of Art's summer art day camp. I'd forgotten it, and what I do recall now are a few bright shards of memory. First, it was cool in the museum. In Baltimore in the summers before air conditioning, being in a cool place was a physical thrill. It was probably 99 degrees outside, and that much humidity, and walking into the museum was treat enough for the whole summer. The rooms were quiet, marble, huge, cool. There was Rodin's Thinker outside, and his Ballerina in the entry hall. The Thinker was just there, but the Ballerina, with her tulle skirt, seemingly made from bronze cloth amazed me. I wanted to touch it, but I had been taught to hold my hands behind me in museums as well as in stores. Much later, when I saw both statues in other museums, I was astounded. I thought they belonged to Baltimore only.

I remember none of the works of art that I must have produced during those out-of-time days in the basement of that museum. I only recall being covered in colored chalk at the end of the day, and drinking cold water from the water fountain and watching the color swirl from my face and hands down the drain.

XieXie

This is how XieXie deals with the long triple-digit days. I had to rouse him to go for our six o'clock walk. 

Camp Whipoorwill

My first camp was Whipoorwill, a Girl Scout camp on the Magothy River in Maryland. I was young enough that when the daily penny postcard from my mother didn't arrive, I was silently, grievingly, sure that she had died. We lived in tents, with a floor of slatted wood. One of the cruelly felt games for naive newcomers was 52 Pickup, which consisted simply of taking a precious pack of cards and tossing it on the floor. We must have played other card games, like Go Fish, or War, but 52 Pickup remains a hollowness in my stomach. During my first year, I learned to swim, and graduated from red cap to yellow cap, and was able to swim in water deep enough to require real swimming. The second year, as my mother drove me from Center Conway, New Hampshire, to Maryland, for camp, my mind was filled all the way with the absolute knowledge that I'd forgotten how to swim, and that I'd be sent back to red cap. New Hampshire was were I'd always spent my summers, and Girl Scout camp was an exciting, but worrying prospect. 

I was a child of silent worry. In kindergarten, Miss Hoyt had a worry bird, made out of a pine cone and painted clothes pins, that we could talk to. Miss Hoyt understood about silent worries. If I could be persuaded to come out from behind the easel that held in private wonderful jars of tempera, I would gravitate to the worry bird. My pictures were always painted to the very edges of the paper.

Of course, I remembered how to swim, and my worries were abated by being a returning camper. I felt more reliance on my friends. I was proud when, at the end of the first day, the counselor said, "It's time to clean the lanterns. Now, whose names do I know? Sunny and Gail!" With a swagger, we made those kerosene lamp chimneys shine. Another year, Sunny and I became fascinated by the experience of the three-legged race, and came to the flag ceremony still tied together. Our counselors were not amused, and I learned years later that there had been a Phone Call Home to Discuss Behavior. 

The counselors were magically attractive, with all the mystery that teen-agers carry. They read us Nancy Drew; they carried tampons in their shirt pockets. They were our friends, but not too much.  

I spent two weeks there for a few summers, and the last summer, when I was a white cap, the highest rank of swimmer, I learned canoeing. Our test for the canoe badge included capsizing the canoe, then righting it and riding the water-filled canoe back to land. A thunderstorm was threatening, and we paddled vigorously as our counselors signaled wildly from shore. 

Summer

It's a hot summer. Today the high was not 106, as was feared, but 102, which is still very hot.

9 PM:
Murphys, 81.6 
Burbank, sadly, is hotter, at 84 
San Francisco 54.4
Baltimore 74.5
Boston 77.9
Center Conway NH 79.8
San Rafael CA 66.6

These are all cities where I've lived. I remember Baltimore on summer nights when it was 99 degrees and humidity was 99%. This was before air conditioning and sleeping seemed impossible. In one house that we lived in, my sister and I would go to sleep in our parents' bed, and our father would carry us upstairs late at night, when the temperature of the second floor had lowered a bit.

Luckily, most of the summer was spent in Center Conway, New Hampshire. It was always a challenge to pack sweaters and coats for the long, long drive, but we would arrive and it would be cool.

You know what Mark Twain said about summer in San Francisco? It was the coldest winter he'd ever spent. Slight exaggeration, but when inland heats, it pulls the ocean fog and blessed cool air in from the Pacific. Even San Rafael, in Marin County just to the north of San Francisco, that phenomenon held true; although the days were hotter, nights were always cool.

My last two summers in Boston I spent on Cape Cod, as a counselor at a camp run by Boston Children's Services. At least that's the name that I remember of the agency. I can't remember the name of the camp, although it'll probably come to me in the middle of this hot summer night. I do recall it was on Bloody Pond, which name they kept trying to change, to no avail. What inner city kid wouldn't want to be at a camp on Bloody Pond with the ghosts of the Indians killed there. (Forgive the archaic ethnic name - it's part of the legend.) Even Wikipedia doesn't find my Bloody Pond, so perhaps the grownups finally did effect a newer and less exciting name. 

During my first summer there, in 1966, I kept my apartment in the North End of Boston and would manage a few days at home from time to time. I lived in a vaguely restored tenement, with a bathroom in the hall, to be shared with the other tenant on the floor. My apartment was a three-room railroad flat along one side of the air well that served to provide fresh, but unmoving and hot air to the apartments that lined it. 

Which reminds me of humidity. The east coast is full of it, I remember, and I hear it still is today. So the temperature figures above are not a true reflection of how it feels. We don't have any humidity here in the foothills of the Sierras. I'm not sure there is humidity in California, unless you count fog. It never rains in the summer at this elevation, although summer thunderstorms are not uncommon in the high country. I remember many camping trips in the pouring rain. But we never went home because of the rain.

The danger of thunderstorms in most of the state is the danger of a lightning strike in the hot, dry, dusty grassland or wooded mountains. 

Tonight I have the air conditioning on, two ceiling fans and a table fan in the bedroom. I confess that I will leave the AC on all night - it'll go off when the temperature gets down to 77. I'll be asleep then.