Kurt tugged on dark brown shoes over mismatched white socks and topped off his outfit with a favorite navy blue jacket decorated with baseball emblems. Ron dressed Kurt for the damp, chilly morning: red jersey, navy blue sweatshirt, speckled red and black corduroys. “I’m so glad Daddy built a bonfire,” he said. Kurt slept until nine, fighting off a cold when he awoke he shivered. Ron took the bite off the morning, using the last of the wood to light a fire.
Sunday broke with a heavy mist over the ponds. It became a sort of joke between Ron and me. We had a girl and then by a stroke of luck we had a boy, just what we wanted. From before we were married we always said we’d have two children and no more. We had saved for four years to buy a house, and when we were ready, there was our house across the street from the elementary school. “We’d been married eight years,” she would say later, “and everything just seemed to work right. To Jill Newton things felt “just right,” which was not unusual. It was the end of summer, and there were huge meals and laughter and quiet, chilly nights by a roaring fire. On Saturday their friends arrived, and Kimberly raced her bicycle through mud puddles while Kurt furiously pedaled his big-wheel tricycle after her, trying to keep up. “It isn’t camping without a bonfire,” Kurt said happily. It was their first trip with the recently acquired secondhand tent trailer, what Jill called “our luxury.” They gathered wood along an abandoned logging road nearly a mile from their campsite.
Mountains loomed over the ponds, and when at night a loon wailed and the forest pressed close on all sides, you knew you were away.
When a fisherman landed a salmon from the small wooden bridge below the thread of beach, he would yelp with pleasure and a crowd would gather. Campers fished from two ponds that were deep and cold. Natanis Point Campground was small and remote, its fifty-eight sites cut from a paper-company forest 1,300 feet above sea level in Chain of Ponds, a wilderness township six miles below the Canadian border at Coburn Gore. It had been a grand weekend, camping with their children, Kimberly, age six, and Kurt, age four, and three other families from their home in Manchester, Maine.
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