The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [79]
More and more I feel like a letter – deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.
The Camp Grounds isn’t much to look at. It’s a stretch of land between the road and the Jogues River – an acre or two – with trees and scrubby brushwood on it, and mosquitoes in spring, from the swampy patch in the middle. Herons hunt there; you can sometimes hear their hoarse cries, like a stick scraped on rough tin. Now and then a few bird-watchers poke about in the woebegone way they have, as if looking for something they’ve lost.
In the shadows there are glints of silver, from cigarette packs, and the pallid, deflated tubers of tossed condoms, and discarded squares of Kleenex lacy with rain. Dogs and cats stake their claims, avid couples sneak in among the trees, though less than they used to – there are so many other options now. Drunks sleep under the denser bushes in summer, and teenaged kids sometimes go there to smoke and sniff whatever they smoke and sniff. Candle stubs have been found, and burned spoons, and the odd throwaway needle. I hear all this from Myra, who thinks it’s a disgrace. She knows what the candle stubs and spoons are for: they are drug paraphernalia . Vice is everywhere, it seems. Et in Arcadia ego.
A decade or two ago there was an attempt to clean this area up. A sign was erected – The Colonel Parkman Park, which sounded inane – and three rustic picnic tables and a plastic waste bin and a couple of portable toilet cubicles were placed there, for the convenience of out-of-town visitors it was said, though these preferred to guzzle their beer and strew their trash somewhere with a clearer view of the river. Then a few trigger-happy lads used the sign for shotgun practice, and the tables and toilets were removed by the provincial government – something to do with budgets – and the waste bin never got emptied, although it was frequently pillaged by raccoons; so they took that away as well, and now the place is reverting.
It’s called the Camp Grounds because that was where the religious camp meetings used to be held, with big tents like a circus and fervent, imported preachers. In those days the space was better tended, or else more trampled down. Small travelling fairs pitched their booths and rides and tethered their ponies and donkeys, parades wound themselves up there, and dispersed into picnics. It was a place for gatherings of any outdoor kind.
This was where the Chase and Sons Labour Day Celebration used to be held. That was the formal name, though people just called it the button factory picnic. It was always the Saturday before the official Monday Labour Day, with its earnest rhetoric and marching bands and homemade banners. There were balloons and a merry-go-round, and harmless, foolish games – sack races, egg-and-spoon, relay races in which the baton was a carrot. Barbershop quartets would sing, not too badly; the Scouts bugle corps would honk its way through a number or two; squads of children performed Highland flings and Irish step-dances on a raised wooden platform like a boxing ring, the music provided by a wind-up gramophone. There was a Best-Dressed Pet contest, and also one for babies. The food was corn on the cob, potato salad, hot dogs. Ladies’ Auxiliaries put on bake sales in aid of this or that, offering pies and cookies and cakes, and jars of jam and chutney and pickles, each with a first-name label: Rhoda’s Chow-chow, Pearl’s Plum Compote.
There was horsing around – hijinks. Nothing stronger than lemonade was served