This is fiction, but based on Jacoby's Camp.

SUMMER PSALMS 53:7-8
Annice Jacoby

Sonya noticed the signs had started. They were near the mountains now. This county prided itself on the highest per capita billboard rate in the nation. Come swim. Come dive. Sometimes they went to the track in a large group and cheered as a section. Sometimes it was cold enough in August to wear a mink wrap. She was glad she packed hers. Her children were irritated with her slow response. She tried to muster some concentration.

They arrived with the mosquito music at the edge of day. Sonya tucked the children into the foldout in the cottage bedroom. Flystrips from last summer hung like diseased shadows. The beds were sticky from tarpaper and mothballs. The mice had chewed the cardboard boxes with winter storage leaving a forest of silt everywhere.

A thousand bucks for the bungalow with two tiny bedrooms. The kitchen and adjacent bath, a living area, knotty pine, yellow formica marble swirl table, matching chrome chairs, a day-bed that doubled as a couch and guest room. Seventy-five more for each kid in camp. The handyman's wife cleaned for ten. There was a makeshift laundry at a quarter a wash and free drying on a bunch of collapsing lines. Sonya would often drift around in the overgrown grass collecting underwear caught in the nettles. When it rained the tiny building fashioned with rustic ingenuity, bellowed with sweetness. Large meals were washed down with seltzer from the moist blue explosive bottles stored on the porch. The colony was full of conveniences. The dairyman drove his pickup around every evening at five. Joe the fruit man parked daily under the shade maple. It was easy to spend July 1953 eating peaches, grapes and cantaloupe.

The colony was owned by hardworking first generation Jews. They had come in the spill of World War I and were prosperous by the second war. When he bought the land in 1937, Saul Gersh, befriended Pierce Gillete who had been born in the stoic farm house surrounded by lilac and birch. Starting with the hand pump side mounted on a concrete slab in the back of the house, Pierce showed Saul the crude basics of plumbing and milling.

The first change Saul made was to divide up the old house into summer apartments providing relief for families from the city summers. His customers were all Jews who seemed affluent, boisterous, cranky, and joyous to the few locals. Words moved in their mouths in a completely different style. The colony spread on top of a mountain overlooking the valley three miles down the unpaved road. The only local industry was the state farm penitentiary and a some tack shops and taverns that served a famous trout fishing river.

Saul was investing in the future. He was preparing for swimming pools, convertibles, casinos, comics, concessions, loud speakers, the resort regalia. In the beginning there were just a few families. Men in their late forties, sons facing the war, older women without men who took long walks in the untended crabapple orchards, gathered ferns as labor day approached and the August night chill made them yearn for their heated apartment in the city.

Saul hired Pierce because he needed to understand the country. Pierce was wry and pale and had lost a few fingers in rough timbering. They bought a barn at auction for fifty dollars and moved it from the valley slated for dam flooding to the perfect pitch on the side of Saul's mountain.

During the war, they set up their own logging and mill operation. They leveled ground, dug and wired one little bungalow after another. They would build two or three every year. Each spring they would jack up the ones that had shifted on their concrete blocks during the winter freeze. In the spring, the fishing enthusiasts would invade and they might occasionally find bear shit with whole jars of salmon eggs. Saul and Pierce stayed strong enjoying lunches of herring and rye bread, schav and schnecken. Pierce might joke. "Saul, what's a phillips screwdriver?" Without waiting for an answer he'd roar "Milk of magnesia and vodka!"

By the late forties Saul had bought house plans from Sears, with a pine panelled den and dug a lake with a rural development grant. The docks kept disappearing and the beach was pebbles, but the lake became part of the ecology, snakes and blueberry bushes thriving in the confluence of cold streams.

Saul enjoyed the rigor and profit of his colony. Every morning in season, he poked among the dewdrops on the lawn with a broom pole nail contraption for bits of debris. He discouraged childish pranks by carrying transgressors, boys only, by their ears back to their parents for a scolding. His handsome authority was respected as an asset to the colony.

On Monday, early morning cold surprised Sonya as she ready the children for camp. She wondered how does the word camp serve annihilation and recreation without skipping a beat?

The public address system crackled "Good morning. Yes, this is it. The time for a fantastic summer." Each word was stretched like a frankfurter balloon. "All campers should be at the gazebo on hilltop meadow in fifteen minutes. As always, we have picture day. So get your T-shirts, only two dollars at the concession. Remember swimming after lunch, followed by ice cream, chocolate mellow roll-ups. Dismissal is at five. All whiners will be sent home. Line up in ten minutes. So don't linger at the breakfast table. Hurry up. Welcome to another fabulous summer. Remember! Awards every Saturday."

Sonya found shorts and fresh socks. She walked the children to camp. Under a showy maple her companions for the summer were gathering; dentist's wives, women with a scabbard of knitting tools, community crisis organizers, daughters of merchants and attorneys. Her closest gals, Gloria and Sadie, Belinda and Jeanette walked in a hive of catch up chatter to the concession hall

Lewis, the camp photographer and music teacher was inside selling t-shirts featuring a silk-screened figure diving into sublime mountain bliss. In the corner, between the juke box and the coke machine, was a piano broken from communal abuse. A seven-year old named Loretta sat with her back to the window that framed the mountains, pulling expert arpeggios. She was there every morning for an hour or two so her fingers wouldn't stiffen over the summer. Saul wouldn't let her use the Steinway in the casino because it would set a bad example for the other kids. On long afternoons when the dominant noise was the accordion wave of the crowd at the pool, Saul's wife would secretly unlock the casino doors on to let Loretta play Mendelson and Chopin. She was Polish and Jewish and clung to those composers with a fierce pride.

Later in the evening, beneath the heavy purple moire drapes, a mountain combo capable of ballroom and schlock would play. The singer opened with Old Man River and told bathroom jokes about other races.

"There was a Chinese guy and an Jewish guy sitting on the beach. The Jewish guy kicks sand in the Chinese guy's face.

'Why did you do that?' asks the Chinese guy.

'For Pearl Harbor'

'That was the Japanese!'

'Japanese, Chinese, what's the difference?'

So the Chinese guy kicks sand in the Jewish guy's face.

'What's that for?'

'The Titanic' responds the smiling Chinese guy.

'That was an iceberg!'

"Iceberg, Goldberg, what's the difference?'

Sonya was surprised to see Lewis in the casino on Saturday night. He confused her. He was a French survivor of the camps. Sonya had never heard this from him, but assumed it from the colony's gossip. He was Jewish, but exotic and her age. Most refuges she knew were older.

Mimi, Lewis' wife, could hardly speak English and became boring very quickly. She was also a refuge who had escaped from Munich at the age of 14 in 1940 to join her sister in New York. When Mimi found her sister, the woman denied recognizing her. Mimi's sister had married a man and had never revealed to him that she was Jewish. She could not accept her sister without stripping her veil of assimilation. The Jewish Guardian helped her find work making patterns. There she met Lewis who wasn't bothered by her quiet or refusal to learn English. In the casino, Mimi's attempts to dress-up contrasted with the other women playful in their designer delights discovered for a song at Loehman's. Sonya's dress was a fire red sarong, pleated chiffon over the breasts, closing at the waist with an oversize aqua bow. She loved it, Michael, her hard working husband, loved it. She knew she was at camp.

Lewis spent the off-season working in the mountains so he could have his own colony some day. Sonya sensed he might have been too shocked to deal with the pressures of the city. He taught music in the schools and photographed weddings on weekends at the big hotels that lured winter cliental with baby ski hills and indoor pools. He hummed what he remembered his mother singing when she plucked chickens and scattered feathers and woe about her. Mimi and Lewis had a daughter fat as a burnished plum. She was shy and dependent on Lewis' affection. Though she was born one snowbound day at the hospital twenty minutes from the colony, she spoke the heavily accented English of her parents. Mimi was still pre-occupied with fear. Lewis had begun to relax. He had conversations with Sonya about painting with a palette knife or rounding up five people for prank singing. The easy swing pop tunes lent themselves to quick jokes. On costume night, Sonya and Lewis helped dress the crankiest colony husband as a pregnant ballerina. He wore a sign declaring, " I should have danced all night" over his bronzed bountiful belly.

Sonya never realized that she spoke with Lewis with the flavor of raspberry sherbet. Her optimism was her beauty.

Sonya and Michael woke up one Sunday afternoon. They had arranged a lovemaking nap by sending the children off with visiting cousins to the race track. Sonya flipped on the radio for the last moment of "Helen Trent - Can a woman find romance after thirty five?" The program depressed her. Her mother-in-law was a faithful listener. All the fascinating thrillers portrayed glamorous woman alone and unglamorous women happily tucked at home listened. Michael switched to the news. He had an eager mind, absorbing it all. Sonya was tired of his impressive patter. She lay on her belly. Michael jumped up and said "Beautiful, I'm off," sweat stained leather gloves tucked in his shorts "for a little handball and a very cold swim. Don't get too lazy."

Sonya heard reports of a polio quarantine on the radio. The pleasantries of the summer could no longer mask the smoldering fear inside her. The children must not move about. They must stay in a small population, minimizing the risk of contamination. There was talk of a vaccine, but it was not yet perfected. Her daughter was a Polio Pioneer.

Sonya ran a bath and sat so long her own limbs seemed mossy as the afternoon sunlight filtered through the water. Saul had given the place a touch by choosing red bathtubs against the dominant dance of the knots on the pine walls. As the light intensified, the bath oil jelled in a human pond scum. Drawing more hot water, Sonya reminded herself of duck soup, Venus swamp, a fertility goddess. The only mythology she remembered from one year at Hunter College was image of the genitalia of Uranus tossed upon the foam giving birth to Aphrodite.

Two hours later Michael returned jubilant. She spilled her concern and they agreed that only he should leave the colony for the rest of the summer. The jeopardy in the city was worse, large crowds frightened away from the beaches. Each age invents the personality of the disease that plagues it. Polio struck the nerve of remorse, crippling a perfectly fine fruit, disturbing with stories of sex in an iron lung. Their conversation assured her of a plan of defense, leaving Sonya contented in their good judgment.

During the weekday evenings she had been accustomed to going to hotel shows. At first she relished the quiet. Then she got bored.

She started carving hunks of wood, gathering rocks and making terrariums. This started a fad among the other women. They would take the treasures of the mountain summers back to their apartments filled with reproduction French Provincial furniture. The salamanders their kids caught would manage to live through most of the winter. Usually they were taken to school and lost on the way home. They were always crawling out of careless cans into the cracks of urban lives.

One evening the tractor was filled with hay and schucked corn. The merry mothers and campers were driven down a logging trail to a field where Pierce had dug a trench and filled it with scrap oak and charcoal. They roasted the corn and fashioned sticks to burn marshmallows. They ate with buttery relish and sang songs from "Oklahoma" stretched out on army blankets. The children cuddled in listening to a story Lewis was telling about a man stalking the woods for the culprit who shopped off his golden arm. Sonya's son asked, "Is that Hitler?" Lewis passed a brandy flask discretely to Sonya who loved the raw vanity of its heat. Everyone was sleepy and piled back on the tractor wagon, no longer enjoying the bumpy ride.

Sonya woke the next morning when the sun was strong and sharp. She snapped to the task of dressing the children. She burnt the toast and pushed them out the door. The smell of the toast lingered till she went out to the pool. The acrid smell was still in her nostrils. She grabbed a sunhat and ignored a dread taste in her mouth. The summer was dry.

She glanced at her side and saw a spiral of smoke from the field on the hillside. She ran for Saul. She ran for Pierce. She dropped her book and sunglasses and found both men behind the laundry reassembling every nut of two washing machines to make one good one.

Saul, cool, shouted simple orders and jumped on the tractor in the direction of the fire. Pierce ran to Saul's wife to call the fire department, six and one-half miles away. The all-volunteer corps of local masons and dairy farmers, although busy with summer work, were always on call. Forty-five minutes later they arrived with one truck and two captains' cars. A policeman and a public health officer arrived. A sense of panic and courage brewed with the fellowship of the emergency. Saul had not returned. Five or six men followed on foot towards the smoke. The smoke had intensified into a broad black curl. Since it was mid-week most of the men were working in the city. The colony knew within four minutes of Sonya's sighting that something was wrong. The campers were sent to their parents.

The smoke was from the direction of last night's campfire. "No, it's not. It's a field over." Lewis argued. He did not hesitate over the public address system. "Everyone! Listen! This is a Fire Alert. Do not panic. Turn off all the gas knobs. Please go to the Casino immediately."

The fire truck had limited connections from the water tank to the fire several fields away. Saul found a blaze at the center of a hay field far from last night's fun. He ran to the tractor for a shovel and started to dig a trench around the fire. No matter how fast he worked, the fire grew faster than his efforts. The Volunteers found him pernicious and sweaty, a Job smote in his eyes. They started clearing the uncollected hay in stacks away from the core of the fire. The fireman came down with axes and Pierce gathered every damp hose he could find in the barn and work shed to create over 3000 feet of hose. He reached a field away from the fire. A group of women left their own children with the cluster by the gazebo. They ran toward the fire through the adjacent fields where they usually picked blueberries and cheered the baseball teams. Two fields over they could now see broad walls of flame and the men silhouetted by smoke, working in shorts, bare-chested, blazed with iron energy. Sonya saw Pierce struggling with an extraordinary pile of green rubber coils. She and this one thumbed man screwed hose after hose till a futile sense of no more hose sucked their spirits. The women were there with buckets, filling one every two minutes, running two fields and back for more. The fire chief called for blankets. The women ran back to their bungalows and gathered them off every bed. The blankets were soaked and thrown on the ground to stamp out the fire. Sonya had noticed the blaze at ten, by three the fire had spread by gusts of wind, first to the protected haystacks and then to the trees toward the lake. The Fire Department ordered all the civilians back.

The thunderstorm began at four. The weary and frightened people already returned to the hilltop to check their children and retreat from the now vulnerable buildings. They turned and cried as they watched the lightening in the black sky threaten the orange blaze at its finger-tips. Saul, whose eyes were red around his green sea iris, could not speak. He stood in the relief rain for an hour until his wife made him come in for soup and sleep.

When the storm departed, the fire department returned from the fields, not very talkative. Even when danger is daily business, this fire had the mystery of redemption. These locals were mostly weary good Christians.

Sonya sat on the bench built completely around the largest maple on the main lawn. People stunned and dazed, focused on distracting their children from the trauma, turned the fire into an adventure. Sonya's son fell asleep with his head on her lap. She bit her lip and just let herself cry. She couldn't tolerate the small conversations around. "A piece of broken glass can catch the sun and start a spontaneous blaze. This place is too primitive. Can you imagine being forty-five minutes away form fire protection? But at least we are six hours form the polio fester. Or are we?" That kind of talk made her feel ill. Michael was not there. He wouldn't even know about the day until the next night when he would call for her city shopping list. Michael, the great provider would feel bad he wasn't there, but with the danger gone, he will forget by Saturday, eager for his handball game.

Lewis sat down besides Sonya and said, "I choose the mountains to keep out of danger. I am not intrigued with the danger of business or the danger of politics." Sonya heard Saul's wife playing the piano. Lewis walked her to the bungalow helping with her sleeping child. He asked, "Why did you leave the children's musical last week-end?"

She was startled by the question. "Because I thought the worse thing in the world had happened. My son was in the middle of his solo. He was sitting on a swing rigged to the stage ceiling, holding a glitter moon, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. There he was, my adorable kid, summing up all the love America ever had for Judy Garland or Shirley Temple. Then some jerk gets on the p.a. and starts shouting ' Ladies, Meyer Faith's Kosher Frozen Pizza is on the premises for the next fifteen minutes.' God, have you ever heard anything so stupid. Cheese is cheese. The rennet from a cow killed traife should make a difference? Some idiot didn't know that this is my kid's shining hour. I ran out of the casino, across the lawn to the p.a. system. I found this guy with a t-shirt that did not cover his fat belly and a black dress hat on in the middle of summer, proceeding to loudly, without poetry go on about the virtues of his pizza, on the wrong channel. I grabbed the microphone out of his hands and cried 'Schmuck, Out of here!' And then I ran back in time to see my son smile for his applause, oblivious to the fact that it had been a duet with Meyer Faith. The audience was
hysterical, laughing and applauding his perseverance through the whole song in syncopation with the pizza man. I missed the whole song."
Her next round of tears pulled feelings from the wings of her back. Sonya let Lewis hold her. They were very still for a minute.

Saul's wife called attention on the public address system. "Thank you for all your help on this terrible day. The fire chief assures us that all is safe. The fire is completely out. We know all of you sacrificed blankets. The Red Cross is bringing more in about forty five minutes. My cousin Herbert is in the wholesale quilt business. He has already been contacted about replacing your blankets. Believe me, his stuff is very nice. Also the water pressure is very low for all the attempts to put out the fire. Please use water very carefully. If you have any problems, Dr. Levy, the nice doctor from the prison down the road, is on call. You know that he has served our colony for many years. Please do not worry. The fire is out. However, the fire chief and the health inspector remind you the Polio quarantine is absolutely in effect." In the course of listening to the announcement, Sonya and Lewis released their embrace and never had occasion to touch again. Sonya followed Lewis out on to the porch to watch the smoldering ash crochet a haze on the night sky.

On Labor Day, Sonya wistfully packed the little blue magnesium bottle holding three teeth her children had lost during the summer. She placed it on her night table in the city. There she had a ceramic cougar that faced its partner on Michael's side of the bed. Airbrushed pink glazed around the mouth, the cougar smiled at Sonya when she read late in the night while Michael slept, exhausted by his worldly work.