Hotel Madockawando Letters — 1908

Heron Island, Maine           Yes truly! 2:40 pm

Dear Family—

I just heard a familiar hoarse husky whistle and remarked casually "Oh there's the Enterprise" and resumed my work. But I had to get up and watch the old black hull come waffling complacently up. The Enterprise is so like Miss Lauer grown old. The most important news item is that the last mail went out at 12 this noon and I missed it, and there won't be another until Monday, so you will go 2 days with no mail and probably imagine us in the watery grave in which we pictured ourselves this morning. It was so rough that they couldn't go straight around Linniken Neck but had to go way out around our island to avoid the swells broadside. Golly! It was rough.

I can't write it all down. (Later I did though)

I am simply wildly ecstatically happy and well. It's a cool grey drizzly windy day, and the surf is rushing all the time and the crows calling and the ocean smelling.

I've just been over in the Gunn Cottage sitting in front of their fire and reminiscing. It has all come back so forcibly that now Shore seems like the dream and Heron the reality. How I wish you were here. If I was ever in love, it was with Heron Island.

There's a sailboat just starting out towards Thumbcap. I would take this trip if I had to go without parties for a year. I'm mighty glad I came.

I just came downstairs and am sitting in a Morris chair in the Annex sitting room with a big birch log

fire in the fireplace which explodes every once in so often. How different from Pierponts! [Pierponts was a retreat the Binghams had visited in Ventura, California] Nobody there but us would get a huge fire going!

Later, in our room again which as far as air is concerned is the choicest in the Annex, certainly. It is 2nd story and the east side in the middle, built out beyond the porch roof this way — so counting the transom over the door we get air from four directions and a S.E. exposure which is of course fine for sure.

We have a cot and a bed. Blue trunk is in the closet, the other in front of the east window between bed and cot.

Well I wrote you yesterday morning in bed on the train— oh what a nightmare that was! I stayed in bed until we got almost to Boston. I felt as if I had a raging fever and took my temperature

and it was only 99! But I had az [asthma] quite badly and felt as if I were fainting so that Coz held my head and I tried to — you know — into a cuspidor right there in my berth and failed and wept and pouted and all the while cinders and dust were whirling themselves in the window so that the sheet was really absolutely black and all my things. Oh such a mess!

It took me 2 hours to dress in the dressing room and the pullman conductor had to start my powder for me every time because I wasn't allowed to. Then we got to Boston and it was hot and I had to walk miles because all of a sudden our car, which had worried me dreadfully by being so near the front — appeared in the back of the train just when I was about to profit by its position. Then there were no autobuses and we

took a carriage which took us miles up to Washington St.— over rough cobblestones, tearing fast all the way, but losing time by waiting in lines of smelling carts for construction to clear themselves, me meanwhile informing Cozzie that I was dying, with the regularity of a ticking clock. Then once in so often Coz would have a start, do her skirt dance strut, and fish at her traveling case which dangles by her knees to look for telegrams or checks or tickets which she wondered if she could have left at so and so. She always found them, but my pain didn't cease when she did, and all together it was H E L _. (I never could see why the vowels should be any quieter than the other letters, hence the unusual abbreviation.) We did everything correctly. The carriage took

us to the boat and 2 porters carried me up the stairs and sat on the deck in a chair and I got feeling better and better, and when we sailed out of Boston Harbor with the sunset shining on Dorchester Heights, I was so overwhelmed with thanks to think I was alive and present, that I wept again. You see I must have been exhausted after my queer night I wrote you of.

The air all salty and tangy and Atlanticy was like water to a parched tongue. I leaned out our stateroom window and fairly drank it in and slept like a log all night.

Drank about three glasses of boiled milk slowly. We found out how they get it from Maine. It was as good as Annie's. Something in that lunch the night before had disagreed with me so it wasn't a regular attack as I feared for I am almost normal today.

I never heard of anything so marvelous as the way I nipped that attack in the bud just by such a simple remedy of sea air. However I am pretending I still have it and lying down most of the day.

The boat got in [to Bath] at 4:15 and we had to get out at 5:35, as they start back to Boston, so we decided to take the early island boat, which leaves Bath at 5:30 [AM]. We sauntered along dressing and got out on the wharf to find the Island boat crowded and just about to leave, so we just made it.

Fine trip down the river stopping at Eastport, Westport, etc. and the gnarled pines growing out of the seaweed-rimmed rocks looked so lovable and familiar and grand — everything is so exactly the same except all over Boothbay harbor signs up saying gasoline and puffy little launches everywhere. I haven't seen any larger than The Clythe…

…and some were out this A.M. in the fearfully rough sea. The mate said the tide was going out against the strong winds which made it rough.

I looked and looked all over Boston Harbor thinking of you, father, and noticing the island landmarks that you must have known so well. Coz couldn't tell your house. She didn't think of it until too late and I was in the stateroom too sick to go out and speak to her and willing her to come back which she did too late.

We landed at the wharf — a crowd of queer looking young people down there (Rotten, all of them) and no one we knew. Then I remembered I'd written Dolly [Frances Graves, Alice Gunn's half-sister] we were coming by R.R. to Portland and over on the Enterprise. Mr. Race was at the wharf and we walked slowly up. I went to the Annex & Cozzie registered. I had a hot foot bath, unpacked…

…a little and lay down when Dolly came over much surprised at our early arrival. She is as loud-voiced and mannish as ever. Much shorter than I — a bit husky and heavy and a lot of fun and I like her, though I can understand anyone's disliking her.

She has the same attraction to me that she used to have when I was publicly in love with her — as Miss Elsie Something (Just ask Margaret [Doris' younger sister]). We reminisced how Marg would watch our love making and do likewise.

Mildred [Gunn] is a tall rather pretty but untidy looking girl. I'd never know her for the world.

At noon, we had a very good dinner. I took fish (pollock), roast beef, milk and caramel custard pie (inside). Before lunch Mrs. Gunn (Allie you know) came up and spoke to me and after lunch I introduced myself to Mrs. Snow. Beth…

…Snow is here and is to be married next month. George Warner — just as fat — is also engaged!

I returned Dolly's call after lunch and had quite a talk with her and her sister [Linda Graves] before their fire [in the Gunn Cottage]. Cousin George [Rogers]'s family is in Alaska, all back next month. Phil will be a sophomore at Yale. I know he is fine. Dubuque seems so much further off than last Wednesday morning!

They say the surf off the south shore is grand today. I sent you a wire today because I thought you really might be worried at not hearing before Wed. and had it charged to me. As I could have inquired about outgoing mails before dinner and gotten off a card which you would have received Monday.

Mails come down from Damariscotta by boat now.

Dolly and I have planned tennis and visits to our cubby houses. I've written up to date — Cozzie is asleep on the cot. She is so funny traveling — I laugh at her openly so it is all right. She talks to everybody and asks such ridiculous questions sometimes that people laugh at her. She sort of fusses around things before she hits them. I tell her that she can't any time keep a 'wonder' to herself if there's a Tom Dick or H. to ask, then she can fly. It's a bad habit to get into — never to think things out for yourself. Rather go to the other extreme. It is well, if you can, to be just right, as is your

—Little D

P.S. (important)

—Dolly just came to see if I'd go down for the mail with her — can't — undressed.

— Mrs. [Alice] Gunn called me 'an old Islander'. I like her very much.

— Is it possible that Shawn [Shawandassee, the Bingham's resort on the Mississippi River] had been for 8 years, or did I dream it. Every atmosphere here makes me forget it, but I love it pretty much. Of course not like Heron.

— Can't Marg come a week earlier and stay here with me?

— Is this my 6th or 7th summer at Heron?

—Dolly wore white skirt and white sweater to lunch — both look swell.     —OVER—

There is a doctor right here in the Annex — a nerve specialist. So cheer up Marg, I'll have my nerves tuned up if necessary.