Jill Runs the Camp

1

IN OUR courting days, as Jill and I occasionally walked through Green Park in London,I tried to arouse her interest in that camp of mine at Topsfield in northern Maine. I went into a glowing account of the deep woods, the quiet, unspoiled beauty of the lake, and how comfortable my bachelor quarters really were. But Jill was thinking about the ballet for which she was then rehearsing, and though she was polite, she didn’t, really pay much attention. “What is a camp?" she asked. “Do you sleep in a tent? I don’t think I want any part of that.”

The truth is that Jill had led a sheltered city life. She knew London, she knew Paris, she knew and loved the theater; but she simply couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in the rough. This came home to me even more in a talk I had with her mother when our engagement had been announced. “Don’t you ever take my child out of a city,” warned my mother-in-law to be. “ If you do, she’ll die.”

We were married at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on May 16, 1927, and after our honeymoon I brought her to my camp. It really was a comfortable one as fishing camps go, and to make things easier, we had a friendly caretaker in Ralph Thornton and a marvelous cook in his wife, Fanny. But this, understand, was Jill’s first introduction to the woods. She had to learn not to use her London manners towards the lumbermen and guides who occasionally drifted our way; she had to put up with the insects which are an inescapable part of camp life; and of course I was eager for her to share my love of fishing. It was a time of adjustment for us both.

As my health came back I began to feel more restless than ever for a new job. I did part-time work in the campaign for Conservation which was then just beginning in Maine; I made occasional trips across the border into New Brunswick, and on one of these my friends brought me to an incredibly lovely camp site on the bank of the Southwest Miramichi. Here, where the famous old colored bridge spans the river, was the Porter Cove Pool, over a hundred yards in width and, as far as I could judge, a natural resting place for the fish in high water and low.

When I drove Jill up to see it she was just as excited at the prospect as I was. And in no time we were projecting the kind of camp we might build there. But it took me a year to arrange for the property along the high riverbank and to secure a ten-year lease of the pools above and below the camp site — three miles of river in all. At first we planned simply for a single cabin big enough for ourselves and a friend or two, but the Depression hit in the first autumn of our building and the venture took on a much more practical aspect. Now we were building because in a way our livelihood depended upon it; now we were building a place which we hoped would attract the pick of American anglers, who would come to us at a reasonable price. We planned to open for business in May of 1930.

Never shall I forget how hard we worked. Jill was just as intent on the building as I was and she certainly was a novelty in the neighborhood. She wore heavy underwear, ski pants, a flannel shirt, a Hudson’s Bay coat, mittens which she knitted herself, a fur cap, and lumbermen’s rubbers with big thick socks. It was an eminently practical costume except for one thing. Ski pants on women were just next door to immorality in the Miramichi country. I remember when an octogenarian (by the name of John Hovey) stopped by to see how things were going. I was pointed out to him as the newcomer from the “Outside.” He stood watching operations for a bit and then asked one of my men, “Who the hell is that boy following Russell around?”

Copyright 1950, by Jack Russell

That spring was one of the most memorable ones of my life. The walls of the Main Camp were going up fast. The log drive in the river was in full progress, the telephone was being installed, the electric light plant was on its way; in a fit of anger I fired the foreman carpenter for not being quick enough. Then, when the tempo was at its height, Jill quietly told me that she was expecting a baby.

Somehow the news got around and I couldn’t help smiling when, a few days after Jill’s announcement to me, I found myself being congratulated on the coming event by Bert Pond, whom we had just hired as a guide. Bert remarked that there were two other women in the neighborhood, one of them his wife, who were also expecting at about the same time as Jill, and then he added, “Must be a microbe loose on the river.”

Jill was not yet up to cooking for us, so we took our meals with Stella Pond, whose house was half a mile up the road from our camp and whose food we liked so much that we asked her to cook for us when the guests arrived. But there were times during the building when I had to ask Jill to fix up some lunch for the gang. She was perfectly willing, but the first time (we then had five men on the job) I must have felt some apprehension, for I absented myself from the scene. I got the story later.

It appears that when lunch was finally announced the men quit work and went to clean up. The first man to reach the table found five potatoes in the vegetable dish and helped himself to all of them, together with a liberal portion of the fried veal, which Jill admitted afterwards was as crisp as old leather. He tried the veal gingerly, then wolfed down all the potatoes.

I heard of this when a hungry-looking man came to find me. “Didn’t your woman cook any potatoes for us?” he asked.

“Why, I am sure she did,” and I went back to make sure.

Jill was indignant at my question. “Of course I cooked the potatoes!” she explained. “I cooked five of them, one for each man!”

We opened house on the sixth of May. The first to sign our register were Thomas F. Magner, the ex-Congressman from New York, and his friend Robert Brown from Brooklyn. They hit into very good fishing from the first day, which was fortunate for all concerned since it made them oblivious of the fact that shingles were still being hammered on the roof as they took their meals. No big deal in the automotive business ever had me more on my toes than the arrival of these, our first two guests. Were they going to be satisfied with the accommodations? Would they like our meals? Would the fishing live up to their expectations?

Our first summer passed on the heels of time. Guests came and went; Jill became more and more the supervisor of the Main Camp and kitchen. I had chosen with a good deal of care a group of a dozen guides, and even in this first season they were working together with enthusiasm and harmony. In the autumn as we looked back on that new register, which numbered eighty-four guests, we realized that our venture had been well launched.

We both needed this reassurance; all the year past we had been paying out — building, hiring, investing in boats and equipment — and we had barely enough money to ride us over the winter, which I knew would be doubly expensive with Jill’s confinement. Our son Bill was born on November 25, the day before Thanksgiving.

2

IN MY concentration on the operation of the camp I am sure I never realized how much was expected of Jill. The open fire in our living room was the heart of the house. We would sit in the dark watching the firelight and discussing our plans for the next season. And by day Jill gave the room those deft woman’s touches which no man would ever think of.

Because Jill is English she cannot live without flowers. As soon as the Main Camp was finished she began looking for a likely spot for her flower garden. She chose first a thin strip of soil running along the top of the bank, opposite the front door. Here she planted a bed of pansies, but they didn’t last very long because every guide and his fisherman seemed to have to tramp over that exact spot as they went down the bank to the landing. Jill’s effort to protect the bed by safeguarding it with a rim of small rocks also met with defeat, for when the fishing was slack the men used to compete with each other in throwing the rocks across the river. So Project No. 1 was abandoned.

Her next try was by the side of the house under the dining-room windows and toward the southwest sun. Here she planted hollyhocks, petunias, sweet William, and a border of portulaca. The garden flourished in this spot until, with rather dramatic suddenness, we discovered that our plan of pumping in water from the river did not work and a well had to be sunk in short order. I wanted to get the hole as close as possible to the house to save pipe, and Jill’s flower bed happened to be the ideal spot. Curtains to Project No. 2!

But Jill had not the slightest intention of giving up. She simply moved her garden a little further away and persuaded Marshall, whom we had hired to take care of the camp the year round, to plow out a central circle of green in our circular turn-around. This was a larger plot, and for it she chose perennials: delphiniums, lupines, phlox, Michaelmas daisies, roses, forget-me-nots—a mass of color. This garden was the best of all, and the flowers broke all records. I don’t think I have ever seen such tall and lovely delphiniums, which grow particularly well in our northern climate. Here Jill planted and cut unmolested for at least three summers. Then it occurred to me that there, surely, was the perfect spot for a flagpole. So we cut one of our tall spruces, painted it white, and, with what was to us a minimum of destruction, sunk it at the front of the garden. Jill retaliated by covering up its base with a rock garden.

In our first season our guests and ourselves were restricted almost entirely to tinned vegetables since there were so few fresh vegetables available in this part of the country. Potatoes, carrots, turnips, and cucumbers were at that time the extent of the local crops, and we knew that our American guests would want more fresh vegetables than these. So Jill took on the planting and supervision of the vegetable garden downriver from the Main Camp.

Marshall was her lieutenant, plowman, and strong back. We don’t do our planting on the Miramichi until June, but the growth is amazingly quick, and in its first year our garden produced for the table lettuce, radishes, peas, beans, spinach, and beet greens by July; green tomatoes, young carrots, summer squash for August; and sweet corn for September. In the years to come that garden not only took care of our needs for the summer but, what was equally important, its canned vegetables went into our storeroom to feed us during the winter and the following spring.

So in addition to young Bill and her flowers, Jill had a major canning operation on her hands. It must have been a full day’s work — how full I did not truly appreciate until I heard her remark, “It seems to me that we spend all summer getting ready for winter and all winter getting ready for summer.”

For a girl who had been trained for the theater, I must say that Jill adapted herself to the backwoods and river life with a minimum of pain. She listened to talk of fishing from morning to night; she ate fish, she admired them; she weighed fish, she shipped fish; and in gusty weather she consoled with those who couldn’t catch them.

Our good friend H. T. Webster, the cartoonist, once asked her how she managed to put up with all this fishing. Her answer was, “Sometimes I feel as if I had fish scales all over me.” Webbie felt a sudden pang of sympathy, and this he showed in his characteristic fashion when, a few days later, he drew Jill aside and said, “Jill, some evening when you’re not too busy, do let’s get together and have a good long talk about fishing.”

3

OUR second son, Jackie, was born in May, 1933. It was a most inconvenient time for him to come, for Jill wanted to give her undivided attention to the camp, where the early sportsmen had been fishing since mid-April.

When Jill came back from the hospital the entire camp — guides, cooks, Marshall, Billy Price, and the guests — turned out en masse to greet her. They were all curious to see the new baby. Buddy, our German shepherd, was wild with delight to have Jill back, and we were relieved to see that he was no more jealous of Jackie than he had been of Bill.

When I was away from camp, Buddy took my place as Jill’s protector. He took his position on the back porch right in front of the kitchen door where he could watch and hear everything that went on. Here he slept all through the summer, and it was always a mystery to me how he could distinguish the guests from a stranger. They might come back in their cars late in the evening, and Buddy would make no comment; but let a fish warden approach, gliding through the night in his shadowy canoe on the lookout for poachers, and Buddy’s ruff would go up and Jill would hear him growl. We had arranged to let the fish wardens sleep in our guides’ camp, but they were never permitted to step out of the canoe on the landing until Jill or Marshall had called him off. Jill would say, “It’s all right, Buddy,” and back be would go to the porch.

By mid-June Jill’s strength had returned, and it gave me a comfortable feeling to know that she was at the helm. It was a big job that she did steering the home camp, but no matter how her responsibilities doubled, she always seemed equal to them and imperturbable.

She was now in full charge of the camp. As the hostess her first responsibility was to the guests: the river trips, of which there might be as many as eight a month, were fussy things to arrange; the supplies for each — and it might be a big party — had to be checked and rechecked before they were packed. In the nursery she had two boys under three years; she was supervising the ever expanding vegetable garden; she was keeping the books after her own fashion; and, as if this were not enough, she now accepted the guardianship of a dozen mangy chickens. A friend who was leaving the country asked Jill to care for them in her absence. She never came back. So here they remained, the nucleus of Jill’s brood. Our guests, who liked to tie their own flies, kept plucking their feathers, so their looks were never repaired. When Jill visited the Stanley Fair the following summer she couldn’t resist the sight of some healthy-looking pullets. We brought sixty of them back with us, and this in turn meant that the hencoop had to be rebuilt and that a foxwire fence had to be built around the chicken yard.

This was the illogical process that brought to us our fresh eggs and chickens, but I must add that Jill was too tenderhearted to be a really rugged chicken farmer. Each of the original mangy dozen had been christened, and long after Eliza and Molly had ceased to lay eggs, they were allowed to hobble about because Jill couldn’t bring herself to have them killed.

To help her, Jill had as loyal and competent a staff as could be found in the North country. In the kitchen Stella had been succeeded by young Isabelle, who by this time had blossomed into a fullblown cook. We were still using the small family range we bad begun with, but on that range Isabelle would be cooking for as many as twenty-nine people. Isabelle made all our bread and pastries, and it took wonderful timing and planning to arrange the baking in the small oven. The pots and pans hung from the center rafter - shining and convenient. We had an outdoor grill where we broiled our fish and steaks, and this all came under Isabelle’s supervision. She had the most remarkable memory about the likes and dislikes of each guest: this elderly angler liked to have a glass of hot water with his breakfast; this perfectionist wanted his new-caught salmon served kedgeree; another favored dandelion greens prepared in his own special way; and in the spring one and all enjoyed the boiled fiddleheads which we gathered close to the river.

And her good nature was inexhaustible. I remember one Saturday when we had thirteen guests departing after lunch and fourteen guests coming in that afternoon. But as it happened they drove in the dooryard just as the outgoing guests were saying good-by. We expected to feed the new arrivals at dinner and not before. As we greeted them it developed that they had had no lunch. Jill in dismay went in to see Isabelle. The luncheon dishes had been cleared up and Isabelle and the waitresses were ready for their afternoon rest. But Isabelle read Jill’s mind. “I know what it is,”she said. “They haven’t had lunch. Let ’em come. That’s what we are here for.”And there was a delicious hot lunch on the table for the new arrivals in short order.

Here were the dishes with which Isabelle made her reputation: First, her salmon chowder, which became the pièce de résistance of our camp; then her graham bread, mounds of which would vanish from the plates; a cookie she created and which we nicknamed “Miramichi Rocks”; her steamed brown bread and baked beans; her chowchow pickle and watermelon pickle; and her pies, which were the tops. She did all the famous ones - blueberry, apple, pumpkin, rhubarb, lemon meringue — and on one well-remembered occasion when Jill had gone to town and had forgotten to give her the lemons, she devised a lime pie which made a hit with everyone. When Jill asked her how she made it, Isabelle said, “Oh, I just made it up out of my head. You left me without lemons, so I had to use lime Jello instead.” And what a pie that was — and is today.

I suppose the greatest compliment was bestowed on her by the chauffeur of a wealthy Boston visitor who had been with us a few days. The chauffeur had been eating with the help. When he said good-by to Isabelle, he pressed some money into her hand with the remark, “Isabelle, you’ve given me the best meals here I have ever had. You know, a fellow gets sick of eating the leavings of à la this and à la that.”

Bill in his third year began to show his independence and that love of the river which is deep in his character. He knew no fear of the water and he wanted to emulate the guides. One day when Jill was occupied with the baby. Bill decided to launch forth on his own. Several fishing parties were upriver, so there was only one canoe at the landing. In it Bill took his stand. He untied the painter. Jill, warned by the unusual silence, went to see what he was up to. She couldn’t find him in the dooryard, and then with a tug of alarm she turned toward the river. To her horror what she saw was Bill’s little figure standing in the canoe, pole in hand, drifting downstream. He was already two hundred yards on his way toward the rapids at Crudens Pool. It was too far for her to swim and, besides, the canoe was going too rapidly. Jill ran, calling to Isabelle. There wasn’t a guide in the guides’ camp, and Marshall was away haying, For a frantic moment she was panicky. Isabelle sped out the camp yard, calling at the top of her voice. Fortunately Jack Hovey and one of the Mackays were coming down the road. She screamed to them, “Bill’s on the river alone!!!” and they came on the run.

They had a canoe on the water in less time than it takes to tell, and paddled furiously after Bill. They caught up with him after he had turned a bend and was out of sight down the river. When he was lost from view Jill was beside herself, for she couldn’t tell what had happened - whether he had been tossed by the rapids or had already fallen overboard. Imagine her relief when at last around the bend came the two canoes, the guides poling, and a little figure sitting erect in the first. As she told me later, Bill was so proud of himself that her anger fizzled out. The confidence which little Bill acquired that day I firmly believe has stayed with him straight through life.

I cannot remember exactly how old Bill was when he started to try to cast, but I do remember that our guests used to laugh when they saw him swinging a two-handed salmon rod in the dooryard, where we do a lot of practice casting. I had Marshall keep the grass well mowed right back of the guest camps, and it was an ideal layout for casting with a salmon line on. Bill’s first fish, which he netted in the spring after his fourth birthday, was a sizable trout. His casting left a lot to be desired, yet he hooked a fish weighing well over a pound, and that instant a new fisherman was born. Bill dashed in to see his mother with the fish in his hand, and Jill’s remark was priceless. “Now,” she said, “we have another fisherman to listen to.”