As Betsy placed the last basket onto a table that had been set up behind a row of benches, a girl with red hair approached with a napkin-covered tin bucket that she placed next to it. The redhead appeared to be a card-carrying member of what I was already thinking of as the Doll Club: half of the kids milling around seemed to be nine-year-old girls carrying little dolls. “They’re muffins,” the girl whispered to Betsy. “My mom made them.”
“Bryn!” Betsy exclaimed. “Your mom didn’t have to bring anything today.” She looked over the girl’s head and waved at a woman who was standing next to a man with hair so red, I knew the couple had to be the girl’s mom and dad. “I can’t believe she even figured out how to use the stove.”
The girl’s—Bryn’s—pale skin was covered in freckles. “We’ve been cooking on the woodstove in the yurt my dad built on my grandparents’ farm. Erik, Anja, and I helped.” The girl pointed into the crowd at the only other kids whose hair looked just like hers. One was a little girl, maybe seven or so, and the other was a boy who was walking back and forth on a bench like it was a balance beam. He looked older. “They’d done this before?” I thought. And then: “What the heck is a yurt?”
Soon, Ron started talking in that voice teachers use when it’s time to start a class. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Let’s all sit down and we’ll get started. Sit with your kinfolk. One family per bench.” He looked over at Betsy and she nodded and smiled back at him.
“Now that you’re all here and relatively well settled in,” he said, “I’m going to explain our setup.” I guess he was forgetting that we hadn’t seen our cabin yet. Not that I wanted to, except that I was kind of holding out hope—unfounded, I know—that it might have a bathroom. There were so many buttons and layers to what I was wearing, I didn’t really know where to begin, but at least it would be private.
“Some people say that they don’t think the camp should have a competitive spirit,” Ron said. “That it’s pitting people against each other in a way that doesn’t reflect well on the spirit of community life.
“So let me explain. Giving the camp a bit of a competitive edge re-creates the sense of urgency frontier people experienced on a day-to-day basis. For them, there were no modern-day conveniences to turn to. There was only the long cold winter that was fast approaching and the matter of survival. If a family didn’t have enough seasoned wood to make it through the winter, they might freeze to death.”
We were sitting right behind the family with the red-haired kids—Anja, Bryn, and Erik, the ones with the yurt, whatever that is. Across from us was a family I’d seen earlier, a woman whose short, no-nonsense haircut had been transformed into an 1890s style with the addition of a hair bow that looked like the kind they put on dogs after they visit the groomer. The dad was chewing on a stalk of hay and I elbowed Gavin and whispered, “Really? He’s that much of a farmer already?” Their little girl was cradling her doll in both arms like she was holding a sleeping baby. I noticed its hair, which was made from strips of rags, was braided just like the girl’s.
The boy was older. My age? It was hard to tell. He was still wearing his felt hat, though most of the men had taken theirs off. I wondered if the boy liked hats. Then I noticed that he’d pulled the hat all the way down to his nose and angled it to the side in a way that made him look like he should be in some black-and-white detective movie, wearing a trench coat and standing in the fog. Or maybe he didn’t like hats after all. Maybe he thought this was a big joke too. Now, that would be cool.
In front of the straw-chewing, bow-wearing, hat-boy family was a group I immediately labeled the Happy Blond People. The parents could have been twins—they were both freckled and had blond hair cut short in a way no hair bow could possibly make look like an 1890s style. Their kids were happy, blond, and sporty too, except one girl whose long hair must have been dyed, it was so solidly jet black. She had her face in her hands but when she moved them, it hit me. Some of it had rubbed off, but you could still tell that she was wearing a lot of black and white makeup. A goth girl, out here?
When she caught me looking at her, I turned quickly back to Ron. “If they did not put aside enough food,” he was saying, “people on the frontier might starve. What Betsy and I found so valuable in our experiments living on the land was the starkness of this contrast, the idea that you couldn’t just open up a new line of credit on your house to pay for the things you needed. You truly had to rely on yourself.
“We want you to have this experience as well. So we’ll meet up every Sunday as people would have done on the frontier if they were lucky enough to have established a church, and we’ll share our progress and our frustrations. I’ll make an assessment of how you’re doing, which doesn’t really matter in any way, but year after year, people tend to take pretty seriously.”
“Oh, my God,” I whispered to my dad. “We get grades?”
“Shh, Gen,” he said, but the look on his face was the same one he gets when he’s been stumped by a clue in the Sunday crossword.
“It’s a simple system,” Ron explained. “Each week I’ll visit your farm and see what you’re up to. I’ll assign you a grade for the week based on overall preparation and the efficiency of your execution of what you set out to do. I use a scale of one to ten, and at the end of the summer, we add it all up to get your score. It gives you a goal, and it keeps us honest while we’re out here. This is real. You won’t get anything out of this experience if you don’t feel that way. It’s not a vacation.”
My dad leaned over to whisper, “I thought this was a vacation.”
“I gave you the brochure to read,” my mom hissed.
“It sure is priced like a vacation,” he grumbled.
“A few final words,” Ron said, “about the actual work on your farm. Each of you has been assigned a cash crop that you will be raising on the bulk of your acreage. In addition, you’ll be tending an extensive kitchen garden. This late in the season, all of the major planting has been done, and in the case of the gardens, we’ve even been bringing some things in. We do this before our families arrive. My daughter, Nora”—he pointed to a girl I’d seen helping him move benches earlier—”has been a great help with the work in the fields. Betsy has been magnificent in tending the gardens, and we’ve used some hired workers as we always do off-season. You’ll be responsible for taking it over now, though. Thinning, weeding, watering to whatever extent that’s feasible, and before the end of camp, we’ll start pulling in the harvest, though most of that will happen after you have left.
“Each family will also take on a significant farm improvement project. We have some at the ready for you, or you can feel free to suggest one that speaks to your talents or desires. Just keep in mind that I’m talking about barn raising and road building—not fixing a door or screening a window.”
“This sounds like sharecropping,” my dad whispered to my mom, loud enough so the man with the red hair turned around to stare. My dad rubbed his hands over his forehead, scratching at his hair and then under his collar. “We do the work and live in unimproved cabins on the farmer’s land. He keeps the harvest?”
My mom turned up the corners of her mouth in an if-you-insist-on-looking-at-it-that-way-you-deserve-to-be-miserable look. Just as she started to speak, the dad from the red-haired family leaned back toward us again. “Shh,” he said, like someone was talking on their cell phone in a movie theater. My mom’s face turned bright red. My dad rolled his eyes. I tried to draw my knees up to my chest, which is something I do when I’m embarrassed, but it’s a lot harder when five yards of skirt, a petticoat, and bloomers are involved. Let’s just say I almost fell flat on my face in front of the bench.
Gavin caught me, and as he was pulling me back to an upright position, he said, “Let the fun begin.”