Stadium High School - Tahoma Yearbook (Tacoma, WA)

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22 THE TAI-IOMA ??. l..ord! We had a great time, said Bilious, when asked about the trip he and three other savages had taken up l'lood's Canal the summer before. And cheap-why, we got nearly all our eats, chickens, and eggs and vegetables, you know, for nothing, or 'for the takingf if you want to call it that. .And we made more 'summer acquaintances' in those two Weeks than in all our lives before. All those farmers us or knew of us Say, it was great. up that Way knew before we gots thru. You see, there were four of us and we'd never been away together before, so the trip was full of sur- everybody. They called or 'Biliousf according to what I was doing'at the moment. Then there was 'Uselessi fhe pro- nounced it Ulyssesj, the 'Cherubf so called because of his unsophisticated and innocent expression when he ex- plained to the farmer why he was weeding his vegetable garden. And then there was F lossy, which needs no explanation. We had decided to let 'Uselessl run the 'Tin Lizzy' on account of the dexterity with which he cut the corners on 9th and Broadway in his Hudson, but when it came to the simple matter of starting that Evinrude, there was nothing doing. Useless started his Hudson by pulling a lever, and stop- ped it by pushing another one, and when anything else was required, he telephoned down to the garage for some one to come up and assist with the car. Flossy and the Cherub weren't any good at this either. The former had taken Physics from Tvlr. prises for me 'Cap' 33 .99 Post and was entirely too theoretical. and the latter was artistically inclined, so of course I had to start the thing. I had a hair pin that I used to wiggle around in the old engine and sometimes it went and sometimes it didn't. Mostly it didn't. Our morn- ing recreation was getting that engine in a good humor, and when that was accomplished, we had to let it go until it ran down itself, and it certainly landed us in some queer places. Well, we all met on the dock about 3 o'clock tha.t afternoon and started to load up the Tin Lizzy with our stuff and Useless' 'baggagef as it turned out to be. All I had was what I had on and some canned eats, a fountain pen and some stationery. The Cherub's chief possession was half a sack of spuds, which he clung to fondly, ignorant of the land of milk and honey which lay before us. Flossy had enough canned cream to supply the Day Nursery for a couple of months, and Useless deposited two huge U. S. mail sacks bulging over with bundles in the bow of the boat. l-le told me of cold roast beef his mother had cooked, olives and lots of trimmings. They' turned out later to be a regular Keystone Comedy or Barnum or Bailey side show. A 'LThere are more ways of loading a boat than you can think of, and be- lieve me, the four of us had all the combinations there were. It was half past five before we were ready to start, and then there was another half hour for tuning up the engine. I wiped it all out with a soft piece of rag torn from one of the mail sacks,

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24 THE. T and after talking to it gently for a while, it got to work. worth men- Everything Was serene, the engine was O. K.: 'Useless' was tinkering with his cam- era, the Cherub and Flossy were ac- quiring a good coat of sun-burn, bliss- fully ignorant of the consequencesg and I was steering and writing a letter. That night about nine We landed at a little town miscalled Lisabuella, con- sisting of a combination saloon Cthis was l9l5, rememberl, drug store ftho they are sometimes synonymousj, and a drygoods store and a standing population of five in the winter and ten in the summer. We made a good fire on the beach and prepared to turn in, at least three of us did. Useless, it seemed, was accustomed to certain formalities at this stage in the game and was overhauling the larger of the two mail sacks with a worried look on his face. He was making the dickens of a racket, so I yelled at him: H 'For the love of Pete, man, what do you want to eat at this time of the night for?' Poor Useless' face and voice were tragic. H 'E.at? I'm looking for my pa- jamas, you boobl' I That was the beginning of the side show that I mentioned above. It appears he was also looking for his gold-mounted tooth-brush, a pillow slip, and sheets! And he found them, too-all except the pajamas, and proceeded to use them. Talk about 'roughing it de luxeg' Useless was there with the goods, all right. ul-lalf an hour later when all was quiet, I crawled stealthily out to the boat and fished out the rag that I used for wiping the engines when we started. Closer investigation by the fire disclosed that it was a pair of lavender silk pajamas with Useless' initials on the pocket. Nothing happened tioning that afternoon. AHOMA Next morning he brought out some cologne, a bar of Pear's soap, and a disinfectant for the washing water. We broke camp at nine and ran up to Port Orchard Bay and then to Kingston. About three in the after- noon the engine went on an indefinite vacation, so we stopped and tried to see what was wrong. We camped there all night and took turns sleeping, because there was an old fisherman's shack just above us and he had taken great interest in us and our belongings. We didn't want him or our belong- ings to get the sleep-walking habit, so we really stayed up all night. We had a line dinner of spring chicken, new carrots and biscuits. We would have had some plums, too, but F lossy wa.s surprised by the appearance of the farmer whose tree he was look- ing over, and he fthe farmer, didn't seem to be satisfied by the explanations Flossy gave, so he flrlossyl came back to camp empty handed. The Cherub went on the prin- ciple that everything was good to eat until he'd proved it otherwise, and was always bringing some new kind of fish in to try. One morning he got a particularly ugly brute. The color alone was enough to make you sea- sickg but the Cherub cut it up and cooked it. l-le ate it himself, we weren't anxious to try experiments of that nature, but he didn'l seem as enthusiastic afterward when he start- ed. The next morning we struck a bunch of Hsherman and described the Cherub's fish to them. H 'Them's what's called rat lish,' said one of them, 'Scavengers, no good for eatin'.' Well, we hung round and decor- ated the landscape until they had pulled in the net and were all deeply interested in the contents when Flossy went tearing up the beach towing a monstrous crab by the foot and yelling like the dickens. l don't sec: how