Everyone in the West knows that sheepherders of our time often worry
themselves into insanity in their lonely camps, trying to discover the
wide way and the long way of their quilts and blankets. Fortunately,
Paul Bunyan’s loggers were all strong-minded men, and their blankets
did no more than bedevil them.
After bed-making the loggers heated cans of water over small
fires built out in the timber, and they washed their clothes.
Shaving, boot-greasing, sole-calking, hair-cutting, beard-trimming,
button-sewing, and rip-mending followed; and he was an expert in
these Sunday morning chores who had time to stretch out on his smooth
blankets for a smoke before the dinner gong rang at twelve.
At the ringing of this gong the inexpressible pleasures of Paul
Bunyan’s Sundays began. First, the loggers enjoyed the ecstasy of
eating; and it was an ecstasy they were fitted to enjoy gloriously.
After dinner the loggers would lie on their bunks and dream drowsily
all afternoon of a loggers’ paradise; and the paradise they dreamed
about was none other than Paul Bunyan’s camp; but a camp whose life
began each day with a Sunday dinner, and whose days were all like the
warm drowsy hours of these Sunday afternoons.
But most of the loggers would be awake and hungry again at suppertime,
ready to enjoy the Sunday supper of cold meat, potato salad, doughnuts,
jelly rolls and coffee. Then in the twilight, and for a long time after
the bunkhouse lamps were lit, they would smoke, and talk contentedly
of the delight they got from Paul Bunyan’s cookhouse; and they would
prophesy about the Sunday dinners of the future. There were no
bunkhouse pastimes on Sunday nights. After some hours of low-voiced
contented talk, the loggers would change their underclothes and get
into their newly made beds, rested and inspired for Monday’s labor.
The great cookhouse which so ennobled and cheered Paul Bunyan’s loggers
on their Sundays was the grandest and best planned affair of its kind
ever heard of. The dining hall was so commodious and had so much room
between the tables that four-horse teams hauled wagonloads of salt,
pepper and sugar down the aisles when the shakers and bowls were to be
filled. Conveyor belts carried clean dishes to the tables and returned
the dirty ones to the wash room. The long-legged flunkies wore roller
skates at mealtime, and the fastest among them could sometimes traverse
the dining hall in forty-seven minutes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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