The Colvin family’s campground was located on the lower part of a farm that had been in the Colvin family for several generations. Cows grazed beside the Pudding River, and in the center of the meadow was a roofed dance floor open at the sides and lined with built-in benches. Three families had built simple one-room cabins in a grove of Douglas fir trees, while others pitched tents, some for pleasure, others for shelter, while they earned money picking beans that grew on a plot of land at the bottom of the hill. At the top of the hill were fields of grain and the original farmhouse, probably as old as the house we had once owned in Yamhill.
Claudine and I carried water in a five-gallon can from the little store near the dance floor. The water sloshed and splashed, catching the sunlight and tossing it back like the reflection from a crazy mirror. We split kindling for the wood stove, or more often, when we saw a boy approach, Claudine picked up the hatchet and chopped inefficiently. The boy always stopped to help. We walked to public rest rooms near the dressing rooms, in a building made entirely of old doors.
We ate our meals out under the firs on a table that was Mr. Klum’s pride, a table made of a cross section of a fir tree set on a stump. This tree had been between four and five hundred years old when it was felled. Claudine and I never finished counting the rings, but we did mark a few important years—the year we were born, the years of the World War.
While we ate, Spud chased chipmunks. Once Claudine remarked, “Spud is a chippy chaser.” Mr. Klum laughed.
“Why, Claudine,” said her mother, “don’t ever let me hear you use that word again.”
“What word?” asked Claudine, surprised.
“That word you just said,” said Mrs. Klum. “Just don’t say it again.”
Claudine and I, baffled and amused, called chipmunks chippies whenever her mother was out of earshot. We learned the meaning later when I asked Mother, who answered primly, “a chippy is a woman who sells her body.” How does she do that? I wondered but did not ask. Something about Mother’s manner prevented me.
Early Sunday morning, picnickers, a good cash crop for the Colvins, began to arrive, paying twenty-five cents a car, eager to establish with boxes and baskets territorial rights to the best tables and outdoor stoves. Puddin’ was a place of picnics: family picnics, church picnics, club picnics, lodge picnics. Children yelled and raced, babies cried, dogs barked and sometimes fought, women talked as they laid tables and set out food. From the river came the thwump of the diving board, shouts and splashes. The clang of metal against metal rang in our ears as men pitched horseshoes. Children played chopsticks on the out-of-tune piano on the dance floor, bats thwacked against softballs, picnickers cheered. Woodsmoke wafted through the trees. “Smoke follows beauty” was said to any girl who fanned it away from her face.
The farm food! Fried chicken, baked ham, potato salad, meat loaf and scalloped potatoes, green beans simmered with bacon, freshly picked corn, homemade chowchow and piccalilli, fruit salad with whipped cream dressing, coleslaw made with real sour cream, cucumbers floating in vinegar, sliced tomatoes that had ripened on the vine, pies, cakes and cookies, freezers of homemade ice cream made with thick farm cream, watermelons that sounded hollow when thumped and were carried to the river to cool.
An hour, a very long hour after eating—swimming, splashing, pushing one another off the float, lying in the sun on wood bleached by weather while children raced and sometimes shouted, “Look! I’m leaving footprints in the sands of time!” Then a meal of leftovers before gathering at the dance floor, where the crowd sat on the benches along the sides. Older boys, if they could spare a nickel, hung around under the trees drinking Orange Crush or Green River out of the bottles. One of the Colvins grated paraffin on the floor to smooth it for dancing. Little boys ran and skidded.
“Come on, Claudine, play something,” someone called out.
Claudine obligingly went to the piano and played whatever popular tune came into her head: “Goofus,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Me and My Shadow.” A few young people got up to dance. Children tried to dance, giggled, tripped, and ran off. Extra girls sat on the sidelines trying not to look wistful, gave up, and danced with one another. We all hoped to dance with Bobby Colvin, tan and muscular from farm work and filled with exuberance lacking in city boys during the Depression.
Finally a weary old sedan pulled up beside the dance floor. “Now we can begin!” someone shouted as a woman and two men climbed out. Claudine tactfully left the piano.
One man carried a saxophone; the other lugged a set of drums up the steps and set it beside the piano. The woman carried a box, which she set in front of the drums. On the front of the box was a crudely painted face of a cat with a hole for its open mouth. The woman smoothed her freshly washed percale dress beneath her and, with knobby work-reddened hands, struck a chord to capture attention.
“Folks,” announced the drummer, “don’t forget to feed Kitty. He’s mighty hungry tonight.”
One of the Colvin brothers fumbled in the pocket of his overalls for a quarter to drop into the cat’s mouth. Children gasped. A whole quarter! The drums thumped, the saxophone bleated, and the worn hammers of the piano beat against the strings. “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” A waltz. Young people were disappointed, their parents and grandparents brightened, and men muttered, “Well, I guess I might as well…” as they took the hands of partners. Children didn’t care about the music. They grabbed one another and pranced around the floor.
When the piano player plunked out “Shave and a haircut, two bits” to mark the end of a number, the drummer shouted, “Kitty’s hungry!”
An embarrassing pause followed as everyone hoped someone else would feed Kitty. Finally someone dug a nickel or a dime out of a pocket, Kitty was fed, and music continued: a fox-trot, a schottische, or a polka. Faces grew flushed, skin was cooled by the night air as mist rose from the river. Young people, who considered the dances old-fashioned, drifted over to the store for Cokes bought with nickels they had earned picking beans.
Dancing ended early. Farmers who had to get up to milk cows needed their rest. City picnickers had the long drive—over twenty miles—into Portland.
Mrs. Klum led the way back to the cabin with a flashlight, and Claudine and I climbed into bed on the porch, where we were weighed down by the heavy homemade quilts. Her head rested on a red felt canoe pillow with “Stella” in white letters; my head rested on a softer pillow embroidered with a branch of pepper berries and the words “I love you, California.” Overhead, through the fir trees, we could hear the drone of the ten o’clock mail plane from California. When a train whistled, Claudine named the musical notes of the whistle. I fell asleep thinking of those work-worn hands playing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” for nickels and dimes on a broken-down piano.
Weekdays at Puddin’ were lazy and peaceful. Mrs. Klum pottered about, transplanting sword ferns to the rotting centers of fir stumps around the cabin.
Mr. Klum felt that his dog would appreciate an outdoor vacation, so Spud was left behind when he returned to Portland for the week. Claudine and I took Spud for walks around the campground along a wagon road, past a field of dense tepees of green beans and through a woodsy canyon up the hill to the old farmhouse to watch harvesters.
After lunch I knitted while Claudine read aloud from Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, and when the necessary wait of an hour had passed, we wiggled, complaining, into our woolen bathing suits damp from the day before and walked down to the river to swim and to wash. We sometimes had to swim after the floating soap as the current carried it downstream. Afterward Claudine and I lay on the raft, where the sun warmed us, pressing us against the weathered silver boards. Portland and Gerhart seemed a long way away.
The next weekend, Mother sent word by Mr. Klum that I should return with him on Sunday evening. My Great-aunt Elizabeth was coming from California to visit. I was sorry, very sorry, to leave.
Sunday evening, when Mr. Klum left me at the foot of our driveway, I felt serene, sun-tinged, and happy.
Mother’s first words were “Beverly! You’ve ruined your complexion!”
I flopped into the nearest chair. “Mother,” I said, pleading and without anger, “it does seem as if no matter what I do, you make me feel guilty.”
“Why, that’s ridiculous,” she said.
Somehow I found the courage to contradict. “No, it isn’t ridiculous. You do make me feel guilty,” I insisted, still without anger. I wanted so much to talk honestly with Mother, to tell her my feelings, to become her friend.
Mother stiffened, her mouth a straight line. “Well, excuse me for living,” she said.
For the first time, I understood that I was afraid of Mother for the guilt she made me bear, and that I could never have an honest conversation with her. The woman I wanted for a friend would always be right; I would always be wrong. I have never understood why, for Mother was genuinely kind to others and could be kind to me when I did exactly as she wished.
Then Great-aunt Elizabeth, the mother of the two young teachers Mother had accompanied out West in her youth, came to visit from Southern California, where she lived in turn with her daughters. She was tiny, vivacious, and talkative, loved pretty clothes, and had about her an aura of lightheartedness. She seemed unaware of the Depression, and in her company Mother became the person I remembered from childhood.
Great-aunt Elizabeth seemed to confirm what most of my high school class believed: that everything good in life existed in California. We had learned from the radio and from postcards that in California the sun shone all year round on trees, in groves instead of orchards, heavy with oranges. Highways were lined with wildflowers more vivid than Oregon’s wildflowers. Instead of farming and logging in the rain, Californians made movies in the sunshine. Life in California was one long, happy fiesta with everyone dancin’ with Anson at the Mark Hopkins, dancing at the Avalon Ballroom on Catalina Island, and dining in a restaurant shaped like a derby. We knew all this was fantasy, but still—somehow, someplace, life had to be better than Portland, Oregon, in the 1930s.
My great-aunt, with her lively chatter and frivolous ways, brightened our lives for a few days. When we saw her off on a Princess ship for California, I was sorry to see her go.