Maw's Vacation: The Story of a Human Being in the YellowstoneHough, Emerson
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Maw's Vacation: The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone
Hough, Emerson
American wit and humor; Camping; Tourists; Yellowstone National Park
Has she earned a vacation? I'll say she has. Is she taking it? I'll say
she is.
Maw has company in the park--not always just the company she or I would
select, were it left to us. Some of these do not go out by motor car. Of
course Abe Klinghammer, of the Plasterers' Union, Local Number Four,
being rich, goes out by rail on a round trip. He can go to the tents
and log cottages of the Camps Company. He does not kick any more than
Maw kicks. To tell the truth, in spite of the front he throws, Abe is a
little bit scared at all this sudden splendor in his life. He is a
little uneasy about how to act, how to seem careless about it, as though
he had been used to it all his life. Abe takes it out in neckties.
Having bought a swell one of four colors and inserted a large cameo in
it, he loses his nerve and begins to doubt whether he is getting by. You
will always see Abe looking at your necktie.
And there is Benjamin D. O'Cleave of New York--with a flourish under it
on the register. He and his wife take it out in diamonds. You would
never see one of the O'Cleave family at a roadside camp fire such as
that where Maw fries the trout and Rowena toasts the bread on a fork.
The original O'Cleave came over in the Mayflower, as I am informed--but,
without question in my mind, came steerage. You will find Mr. O'Cleave
in the swellest hotel, in the highest-priced room. He is first in war,
first in peace, and first in the dining room.
Mr. O'Cleave pays a plenty a head for all his family, for rooms with
bath and meals. The hotel company would gladly charge him more, and Mr.
O'Cleave gladly would pay more. He confides to the hotel clerk--who is a
Y. M. C. A. secretary back East--that he should not care if it was even
fifty dollars a day, he could pay it. But, if so, he would already want
for his money more service, which he waits five hours and not enough
cars to get him over to see the Giantess Geyser play, which the Giantess
maybe didn't play again for eight days, and should a business man and
taxpayer wait eight days because of not cars enough by a hotel, which is
the only place a man has to go with his family? Is it reasonable?
Maw in War Paint
The highly specialized hotel clerk admits that it is not reasonable,
that nothing is reasonable, that he has spoken to the Giantess a dozen
times about her irregular habits; but what can he do? "I would gladly
charge you one hundred dollars a day, Mr. O'Cleave, if I had the consent
of the Interior Department. It isn't my fault."
I wish I had a movie of the Y. M. C. A. hotel clerk when he is off duty
at the desk. I wonder if his faith upholds him when he recalls the
threat of Benjamin D. O'Cleave to go to Europe next year. Ah, well, even
if he does, Maw will remain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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