Chapter 3

Around about 1910, several successful local townsfolk planned and cooperated to construct a road to a remote stretch of shoreline in a snug little cove on Mattinoc Lake, just about seventeen miles northwest of where mother's house now sits downtown. They built a series of individual private summer lodges, or camps as they came to be commonly called, and for all intents, these camps were the very first such dwellings established on Mattinoc Lake. These days, Mattinoc, like many of the lakes in the area, has become almost entirely encircled by private seasonal cottages and year round homes, more like urban subdivisions than wilderness retreats.

Fortuitously for me, among the builders of those original camps was Eli's grandfather, Augustus Potter. When old Augustus and his wife died, the camp passed on into the hands of Granddad. My granddad still held title to the camp up until the time of his death, but Aunt Sylvia and her family and I were the primary residents there, as far back as I can remember. Granddad spent a weekend at the lake now and again during the summer, as did the rest of the family, but Aunt Sylvia's brood and I moved up to camp, lock, stock, and barrel, every May come September, regular as clockwork.

Lake Mattinoc was another world, ....a virtual young boy's paradise. The summers were filled with never-ending, day long swimming and water skiing, leisurely canoe rides armed with peanutbutter and bologna sandwiches and old-fashioned bamboo fishing poles, and blazing beach bonfires almost every night, with red hotdogs and roasted marshmallows in endless supply.

There were rotting and rickety old treehouses, decaying remnants from previous generations, perched in ancient towering pines patiently awaiting restoration by the newest kids at camp. Dark overgrown forest trails, full of mystery, and crisscrossed by abandoned logging roads and meandering trout streams, were to be found around every turn.

No, ....there was never a dull moment at camp, ....and after a long day of hard play, a stiff but welcome bristle straw mattress beckoned us invitingly. The beds at camp were all lined up in a row in "the sleeping porch" as we called it, all of them covered in old-fashioned, coarse flannel sheets, and thick warm red and black striped wool blankets, with a big over-stuffed feather pillow on each one.

Exhausted little bodies snugly slumbered away the crisp summer nights on the long row of rustic beds that lined that porch, as the day's adventures turned seamlessly into that night's dreams. The sleeping porch stretched one entire side of the camp's breadth, and was enclosed with large plate glass windows. The windows were hinged at the top to swing up and hang open on eye hooks in the rafters during hot days or steamy nights. When the big windows hung open, the bugs' and the crickets' chirps and the hoot owls' cries were like a totally surreal soundtrack to a fantastic safari movie, all lushly oozing in through the fine mesh mosquito screens.

The main camp itself had changed very little since Augustus' time, aside from a master bedroom added to one side, and a bathroom and storage shed to the other. The storage shed itself might have measured a mere 8 x 10 feet, but to a small boy like me, it was a grand dark cave, full of divergent and wonderful shapes, textures, and aromas.

There was the fresh and pungent, sweet smelling cedar kindling, stacked high along the back wall, and the shelves upon shelves full of various fuel tanks and oil cans, their petroleum essences delicately spicing the wood's strong aroma like a fine culinary artist might season his most celebrated gustatory creation.

Coffee cans full of assorted nails and screws and fistfuls of coiled wires and strings mixed their fragrant tinges of rustiness with the intoxicating perfume of freshly mown grass wafting up from the trusty old Briggs and Stratton power mower parked just inside the shed door. An old-fashioned Sears and Roebuck model manual push mower with its gleaming ribbons of exposed blades, hung benignly unused in the little shed's rafters.

Behind the wood and the cans and the various odd tools that hung at every angle was a simply framed, four-paned window looking out into the shady forest behind camp. If I stepped up on a shelf, I could peer out past all the sand paper and drive belts and bicycle chains hanging from every wall and beam, right down the winding, tree sheltered driveway that led out to the main camp road.

Granddad always kept one of his infamous pin-up calendars hanging in there, too, and in retrospect, those girlie pics from the 50's and 60's somehow seemed twice as sexy as todays crudely explicit modern editions–––while hardly baring a crevice! I came to find out years later that Granddad and Uncle Ed always kept the 4th of July firecrackers hidden in the shed on top of the wood pile, too, where us curious little half-pints couldn't see them! Yes, ....that little shed was a real wonderland, ....a never ending source of fascination for me.

In the big main camp, constructed in the traditional open-ceiling cabin style, huge rough hewn pine logs and straw chinking were the structure's building blocks, and the camp's sweetly intoxicating smell of pine pitch and varnish would bloom anew each Spring as the old place thawed from the annual northern Maine deep freeze.

The big, bright, red enamelled Franklin stove filled the roomy camp with toasty and therapeutic wood heat whenever small toes and noses would get too cold. Filling the big woodbox, alas, was a ritual chore at camp that was seldom performed before a chill morning demanded a fire be lit. Yes, ....better to suffer miserably, collecting up logs outside barefoot and shivering, while the big woodbox stood by gaping and yawning, waiting to be filled.

Little things taught responsibilities at camp and God was in the details, ....whether we saw Him or not. Is not a cold stubbed toe a hundred times worse than one stubbed while all nice and warm?

Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Ed had three boys and a girl, all younger than me except Gene. My cousin Gene was born 2 days before I was and I probably knew him better than anyone in the world except maybe my own mother. After my father died, I had spent every summer at camp with Aunt Sylvia, Uncle Ed, Gene, Raymond, and eventually Bobby and Kristin.

Gene and I ran with a whole crew of boys who summered with their parents at their own camps, all up and down the cove. At some point during those idyllic summers, all of us caught our first fleeting glimpses of adulthood. It brazenly beckoned to us from the fringes of our puberty, the mythical Siren calling us to partake of her mysterious pleasures.

Camp was the perfect setting for adolescent sexual discovery, too ....warm summer breezes, sparkling blue water, still, starry nights–––and bunkhouses.