Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Summer Adventures - MacCaulay’s Mountain & Letter from Camp

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

"This is the first summer Sam has been in Big Narrows without Dave and Morley..."We are so ready for summer here! Are you? So on today’s podcast we’re talking summer adventures, start to finish, with two great summer stories by Stuart McLean.Ad-free listening is here! Listen to the pod ad-free and early, PLUS a whole bunch of other goodies – like virtual parties, Q&As, listener shout-outs & more. Subscribe here: apostrophe.supercast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the apostrophe podcast network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. Summer is so close I can taste it. I get kind of squirly sounding at this time of year. It is mayhem with all the end-of-school stuff happening for my kids. It's all good. It's all fun.

But oh, my. gosh, it is a lot. Every day there's a different kind of party, a different theme, a different special outfit, a different coach or teacher or school bus driver to say goodbye to. Did you remember the gift? And for some reason, there's like 15 birthday parties every single weekend. I am so ready for summer. And so are the kids. We're ready for, I don't know, a different kind of of chaos. We're ready for lazy mornings and short work days. We're talking summer adventures on the podcast today, starting with one of my absolute favorite stories. Do I say that every single time? It's definitely possible because this one really is one of my favorite summer stories. I love it

because it captures so perfectly that magic of the freedom of of summer holidays. This is Stuart McLean with Macaulay's Mountain. The dirt road that climbs the hill back an old man McCauley's barn, or McCauley's Mountain, as people in the narrows call it, climbs with a steady and certain resolve. It bisects the mountain like a strike bisects a flag,

running from the bottom right of the hill until it loops around to the other side at the top and disappears. You wouldn't want to drive up it in your city car, even though you could make it as far as McCauley's Sugar Shack. Above the sugar bush, you wouldn't want to drive anything along the road, except maybe a dirt bike or an ATV, though plenty of people go walking up there.

Once you pass the sugar bush, there's grass growing down the middle of the road, and the trees are closing in, and it's possible to imagine a time when the forest might swallow the road entirely, but it is a grand place. And you can understand why two boys who walked up there for the first time unsupervised, as Sam and his friend Murphy did this summer, would come away with adventure on their minds. This was the first summer Sam's being in Big Narrows without Dave and Morley. He is at that awkward age, too young to be left alone, too old to be looked after. And so he went alone to his grandmother and his best friend Murphy went along for the company. The boy stayed with Margaret

and her new husband Smith, and they roamed around big narrows on two old bikes that Smith found for them, exploring the world in a way that they never could have if they had stayed in the city. McColley's mountain soon became their favorite place. There's just so much adventure for boys to find on the mountain, the jumping cliff, the lake, the old abandoned cabin, but nothing more exciting than the call to adventure that radiates like waves of heat from the abandoned car that is rusting away where the road flattens at the edge of the blueberry field just before the pond. Over the years, countless boys have come upon the wreck and have reacted pretty much the same way as Sam and Murphy reacted when they came upon it. Murphy saw it first. He stopped dead in his tracks. His mouth

dropped his heartbeat accelerating. What? said Sam, looking at his friend. Oh my God, said Sam, looking where his friend was pointing. Both of them motionless now. The car was no more than 10 yards away. And both of them were thinking exactly the same thing. Dead bodies. As if they were one, they both took a step backwards. There can't be bodies, said Sam, reasonably. It looks like it's been there for years. Skeleton, said Murphy. Zombie, said Sam.

Lost souls. What more could a boy ask for in the dog days of summer than a half-buried, wrecked car, a whiff of fear and the possibility of fear ratcheting in a terror? A plan, said Murphy. We need a plan. And so they worked out a plan, driven more by their curiosity than their bravery. One of them would approach the car.

The other? The other would hang back so if anything bad happened, he could go for help. Who, said Sam. Me, said Murphy. I run faster. If something happens, I can run for help. You can't run faster, said Sam. I can beat you any time.

So they flipped a nickel. And so it was Sam who carried the stick. They dug out of the forest, swinging it by his hip like a club, as he walked ever so carefully toward the car. The blueberry field suddenly still. His feet crunching the gravel on the road, his heart pounding. His body half turned in case he had to bolt. careful, said Murphy, ready to bolt himself.

It was like something from one of those movies, that moment when the hero confronts the great fearful thing, the beast, the mountain, the weirwolf, or in this case, what was left of a 1948 stew to bake a land cruiser. The car once belonged to Peter McCauley, the older of the two Macaulay brothers. Peter put the car in the ditch on October night,

in the 1960s. He'd planned to pull it out, but it snowed that night, and the snow didn't melt. And that meant the car had to stay on the mountain until spring. And that was the spring that Peter McCauley was killed. No one could believe it at the time, Peter, so full of life, so full of adventure. Peter, who everyone knew would one day take over the Macaulay farm until he died on it. Peter, dead and gone. No one had the heart to move the car that summer. And the next one, Peter's father, the original old man Macaulay, passed on himself, and so the car stayed put, a rusting memorial to Peter and his lost youth.

The present owner of the Macaulay farm, the latest old man Macaulay, is actually Peter's younger brother, Garth. Garth was in the car the night Peter put it in the ditch. and driving the tractor the afternoon the combine killed him. Carr was all Garth had left of his brother, and he liked that it was up there by the field. He never made any effort to move it. Any useful bits from the engine had been long scavenged,

and the window shot out by hunters, but the steering wheel was still there, and remarkably it still had tires. Sam peered in the passenger, side window. It's empty, he said. Back seat, said Murphy. Empty, said Sam. What about under the seats, said Murphy? I can't see under the seats, said Sam. Look under the seat, said Murphy. I'd have to open the door, said Sam. And he walked back and he handed Murphy the stick and he said, you look under the seats. Murphy rolled his eyes. Murphy said, do I have to do everything?

There was nothing under the seats. And soon enough, they were sitting at it. Murphy in the driver's seat, Sam beside him, in the same seat where Garth McCauley was sitting that October night so long ago. Murphy had his hands on the steering wheel. If we could get it out of the ditch, said Murphy, we could drive it down the mountain. Murphy was trying to jerk the wheel to the left and the right, leaning forward and peering out over the hood, turning around, checking his blind spot. Then he let the wheel go and he reached out and he opened the glove compartment. There was a snake sleeping in there. It fell into Sam's lap. Some time in their lives, those boys will move faster. After all they're still young. It was in my lap, said Sam, when they stopped

running about 200 yards down the road. It was a rattler and it was in my lap. It wasn't a rattler, said Murphy. It was a mumba, the deadliest snake in the world. It was half an hour before they were able to summon the resolve to return. They didn't want to. They had to. The idea of being behind the wheel of that car with a wind in their hair was too good. Wouldn't we need to have our license, said Sam. They were back in the front seat. Murphy shook his head. Murphy pointed out the window. Murphy said, that isn't technically a road. Or are this a car, for that matter, technically. There's no engine. It's a wreck. You don't need a license to drive a wreck. My father has a license, said Sam. The trek, said Murphy, is going to be getting it out of the ditch. Now they were

circling the car. Murphy squatting down on his haunches, peering at the back wheels. Murphy said, we're going to need a jack and a pulley and some boards. We can jack it up and put the boards under the wheels and pull it out. It was Sam who found the crowbar lying on the front bumper. It was Murphy who said they should pry open the trunk. There could be a jack in there, said Murphy. He never imagined there'd be a pulley too. They found a pile of boards near the old cabin by the lake.

By the time they gathered everything up, it was time for supper. We have to go, said Sam. And so they went home and came back the next morning. They worked at it all morning. At noon they sat on the roof of the car and ate their lunch, their shirts off, their faces stained with mud and sweat. Soon, said Murphy. If we get it all the way down, said Sam, we could fix it up.

And when we get our licenses, we'd have our own car. They had never worked with such concentration. and determination in their young lives. If they worked half that hard, a quarter that hard at school, they would skip grades. They'd win scholarships and medals. They would go to Oxford or Cambridge or God knows where. But schoolwork doesn't involve sleeping snakes

or old cars or the promise a great adventure. They ate their lunch and they jumped off the roof, the smell of the sun on their skinny arms, and they got back at it. jacking the wheels one by one and shoring them up with the wood they had found by the cabin. And slowly, incredibly, unbelievably, they got it done. All four wheels shored up and clear. Okay, said Murphy.

Okay, said Sam. They had the pulley wrapped around a tree on the far side of the road. Slowly, said Murphy. Slowly, said Sam. And slowly it came. as if by magic with slow and certain determination. Before they knew it, they had it on the road, lined up and pointing down the slope

with a log across the front wheels to stop it from rolling away on them. Are you ready? said Murphy. Murphy was standing on the road by the passenger side bumper. Ready, said Sam. There were no seatbelts. Sam was lashed into the driver's seat with the rope that they had brought with them. He was wearing ski golf. Three, said Murphy.

Are you sure you can do this? said Sam. Two, said Murphy. Just get out of the way, said Sam. One, said Murphy. And he ganked the log from in front of the wheels. Nothing happened. Sam said, nothing's happening. And Murphy ran to the back of the car to give it a push,

but before he was halfway there, the car was moving by itself, rolling down the road slowly. Slow enough that Murphy was able to easily swing himself, into the passenger seat, try himself into place, and put on his goggles. They were going faster now. How fast? Depends who you ask. Let's just say a lot faster than you'd want either your son or daughter coming down the side of a hill lashed into a 1946 Studebaker land cruiser wearing ski goggles.

Sam shouted, which one's the brake pedal? Murphy said there are no brakes. Sam said, how are we going to stop it then? Murphy said I'm working on that. Just get us around this corner. They made it around the corner. And the next one, but not the third. Which was surprising because they were actually slowing down,

coming onto a long flat stretch when the front wheel caught the ditch and Sam lost control. And then, well, if you could get them to talk to you about it, they'd both swear they were airborne. that they got air and then they hit the ground with a mighty thwack and it shuddered to a stop. Yowses, said Sam. How fast were we going? A hundred, said Murphy.

Maybe two. They untied themselves. And they got out. And they stood on the side of the road. And Sam said, this is the best day of my entire life. It was only when they got back to their bikes that it occurred to them that they might have done something wrong. Joy riding, said Sam. Grand theft auto, said Murphy.

If they catch us, they'll send us to Juvie. They went back up and they took off their shirts and they used their shirts to wipe the car from top to bottom. Everywhere we touched it, said Murphy. And then they went back down and got their bikes and they peddled home. They talked it over, backwards and forwards, inside and out. They lasted a day and a half before they told anyone about it. Two days after their ride on the mountain, they went to the police station.

They stood by the door uncertainly. Police chief and sole member of the Big Narrows police force, Revlin Kavanaugh, was sitting at his desk, preoccupied with a bowl of his wife's homemade corn chowder. Come on in, boys, he said when he finally spotted them. What could I do for you? We're here to report a crime, said Sam. Thief under, said Murphy.

Joy riding and driving a vehicle with an obliterated ID. I beg your pardon, said Revelyn, reaching for his statute book. Confused. Section 354.2, said Murphy. Revelyn stared at his half-finished soup, sadly, and said, we better go check this out, boys. When they got outside, he said, you leave your bikes here. We'll go in the squad car.

When they got into the car, he said, I'm afraid. you boys are going to have to ride in back. Procedure. Once they were out of town, he put on the siren and the flashing red light. Sam and Murphy sat in the back seat as white as ghosts. No one said much as they walked up the mountain past the sugar shack and the trail to the jumping cliff, around the corner to the big rock, up the little rise, their little hearts pounding, and then around the next corner to where they had driven into the ditch. And when they got there, the car was gone. It was right here, said Murphy.

There, said Sam, pointing. But it wasn't. It wasn't there at all. They kept climbing around the three corners, one, two, three, up the long, slow hill, Revelyn taking off his hat and wiping the sweat from his brow. And there it was, where it had always been, where they had found it that first afternoon,

where it had been for all those years, since that night in October when Peter Macaulay drove it off the road with his brother Garth sitting by his side. Boys, said Chief Kavanaugh, shaking his head and pointing at it. Doesn't look like we have a crime here. But you can see the dirt, said Sam, by the wheels where we dug it up. You can see where we dug it up, said Murphy. Boys, said Chief Kavanaugh, what I see is a 1948 Studebaker land cruiser sitting in the same place where it sat for some 50 years now. I think you boys are in the clear. He drove them back to town. And they got on their bikes and they rode out of town slowly. They stopped on the Thamesville Bridge and they took the path down and sat on the riverbank throwing sticks in the water and tried to figure it out.

It happened, said Sam. We did it. I don't know, said Murphy. There are many cases of socioc psychological phenomena mention in the literature. People can become convinced of things that never happened. UFOs and religious miracles, to name a two. It's just mass hysteria. We weren't hysterical, said Sam. We did it.

Someone took it back. They'll never know the truth of it. Neither of them will ever figure it all out. Murphy will never go back to the mountains. but Sam will and every time he goes up there he'll tell the person or the people he's with about those three days this summer

and they'll make their own guesses as to what happened but no one will ever get it right Peter's brother Garth old man McCauley knows a whole lot more than anyone else about that car slowly rusting away on the side of the road that is slowly disappearing itself but even he doesn't know all of it

He knows that Sam and Murphy found the ropes and the pulley that he left in the trunk, especially for boys like them. And he knows that over the decades, five other pairs of boys have done pretty much the same thing. Boys who found the things he left and figured out how to use them to get his brother's car out of the ditch and ride it down the mountain one more time. He always knows when they're at it, and he's always there with his tractor to pull a car back up the hill. and set it back where it belongs.

And when he's done that, to inflate the tires and to put the rubber snake back in the glove compartment, reassured in some strange way that his brother left something behind that still gives people joy. He knows that part, but even he doesn't know all of it. He doesn't know, for instance, that Stephen Carrigan and Megan Lourius were sitting in the back seat of his brother's old car on the summer. evening that Stephen proposed to Megan, or that Bernadette Armstrong spent a night in it some

40 years ago when she was a young mother in her early 30s and thought that she was going to leave Alfred and decided the next morning as the sun rose over the mountain that she loved him too much to do that. She deserved better, but she resolved to do better instead. And she had a good cry and she walked down the mountain feeling the better for it. These things he doesn't know, these moments fading like old photographs, like the memory of his brother Peter, who left the car at the edge of the blueberry fields near the top of the mountain and vanished himself before he could get it back. All these things hover in the air up there while the forest closes in, and the car rusts and Peter lies in his grave in the graveyard at the bottom of the hill. God rest his soul.

That was the story we call McCauley's Mountain. We recorded that story at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatina, Quebec. We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes, so stick around. Welcome back. Welcome back. Time for another story now. This is Letter from Camp. This is a story from a number of years ago, and people have often asked me where the ideas for these stories come from. And mostly these days, they come from the characters. But in the early days, the stories were brushed with the brush of fact. Sometimes I, as many young writers, do, use the stuff of my own life for the stories. And I'm going to tell you a story from the early days now, an old favorite of mine, and there

is a section of this, a contained section, which has a beginning, middle, and an end within the structure of the story, which is God's truth, which came right from my life. Your job as you're enjoying the fiction of the stories to see if you can ferret out the fact. So it's a story that goes back a number of years. story that goes back to when Dave's daughter, Stephanie, was still living at home. Back when she was still in high school and Sam, her brother, Sam, well, Sam would have still, he would have been in elementary school, I guess. It begins the summer that Margo, Dave's niece Margo, his sister Annie's little girl, that Margo,

it starts the summer that Margo came to visit Dave and Morley. At Christmas, the previous Christmas, Annie had written that she was going to France for the summer. Annie played in a Gaelic music group and Morley said, well, why don't we take Margot and give Annie some time off? Annie wrote back the next day, are you sure? Dave wasn't sure. Dave was feeling overwhelmed. We already have one little girl that I don't understand, he said to Morley. Margo nevertheless arrived.

July 1st, flew in from Halifax by herself. You wouldn't let me fly to Halifax alone, said Stephanie, as she and Dave drove to the airport to pick Margo up. Margo, who was 10 that summer, arrived all sullen and grumpy. She wanted to come to Paris, said Annie to Morley on the phone. I'm sorry. Will you guys be all right? Well, we'll be fine, said Morley. not knowing that at that very moment

Dave was standing by a luggage carousel at the airport trying to coax his niece to tell him the color of her suitcase. Is it that one, he said? I don't know, said Margo. How about that one, said Dave? I told you, I don't know. Eventually they made it back to the car with her suitcase where Stephanie was waiting.

Stephanie was pretty grumpy herself. Stephanie had refused to go into the airport. It was lying in the back seat when Margo and Dave returned. She was wearing headphones, her eyes closed, her feet tapping on the passenger door window. She didn't acknowledge their arrival until Dave reached into the back seat and removed her headphones. Hey, she said.

Ten-year-old Margo watching all this go down, very carefully. Stephanie, who was six years her senior, was the most interesting thing to have entered Margot's universe for some time. Stephanie was a gateway into the world of teenage femininity. As soon as she saw her, Margot knew she wanted as much time with Stephanie

as she could get. She was attentive to everything that Stephanie did, the music she played, the way she used, phone and what she watched on television. She learned that Stephanie and Sam were about to leave for two weeks at camp. Margot was distraught. What about me, she said.

What about Margo, said Dave that night. Dave was holding out a camping association booklet. They were sending the other two kids away. Why wouldn't they send her too? Morley glanced at the booklet and shrugged. She's your niche, she said. So Dave sat down and began flipping through the brochure. He didn't usually handle jobs like this.

He'd only spent one summer at camp himself. He was hired as the arts and crafts director. Before he left for camp, he was seized by a primitive and unfamiliar wilderness spasm. About a book on plant identification, which had pencil sketches in the margins of flowers and trees and shrubs, he was enthralled with it, had the idea that he would spend his free time poking around in the forest, believing that if he applied himself that by the end of the summer,

he could become an accomplished woodsman. Maybe by August some kid hanging around the hike-and-trip office would poke his buddy as Dave swung by and say, that's Dave there. A kid would say it with the same reverence, he might say, that's Pierre Radisson. Dave planned to forego the pleasures of the Red Pine Inn where the other counselors went to drink at night

and get up in the morning with the sun and go to bed at dark. Born at television bred to the automobile, he would become wilderness, Dave. His arts and crafts director, Dave, had a two-room cabin called the wigwam. Wigwam was near the hospital. He set off from his cabin at rest period on his second day at camp

with his plant book in his back pocket. Somewhere between the chapel and the rock where the trail angled up toward the council ring, Dave found himself staring at a shrub with thin striped leaves. It looked like the first picture in his book. It was an Indian turnip. Now, the way you identify Indian turnip, said the book, was by its white root. Dave reached out and plucked the plant from the ground.

To his great astonishment, he was holding something that looked like a white carrot. He still finds it difficult to understand what happened next. Probably it was the word turnip that led him astray. Perhaps he was just excited. whatever the case, Dave wiped the root on his jeans, brought it up to his mouth, and took a bite. He'd already swallowed a mouthful before it occurred to him that this might not have been the smartest thing he had ever done.

And that's when things started to happen in the back of his throat. First thing was a mild burning sensation. The second felt more like a small nuclear device had been detonated in the vicinity of his tonsils. As he stood there on the chapel trail clutching the stump of the Indian turnip, wondering what would happen next, he noticed that his lips had gone numb. In fact, his entire mouth had begun to tingle, and the tingling was crawling down his esophagus towards his stomach.

Turnip in hand, Dave headed back to camp. If he was going to lapse into unconsciousness, he wanted to do it where someone might be there to help him. But once back at camp and still vertical, he felt too foolish to turn himself into the nurse. How could he go to the nurse and tell her he had pulled some unknown thing out of the ground and taken a bite? And so I went back to my cabin and I lay down on my bed. Dave went back to his cabin.

Well, that settles that. We're all friends. or were. He went back to his cabin and lay down on his bed. And it occurred to him that if he slipped into unconsciousness, no one would know why. He got up and he put the turnip on his desk. And then he wrote a note and placed it beside the turner.

The note said, I ate some of this. He drew an arrow pointing at the turner. Dave figured if he made it to dinner, he could destroy the note, and no one had ever know anything. If he blacked out, on the other hand, someone would eventually find him, read the note, and organize the appropriate treatment.

Dave lay down and prepared to die. After an hour of prayer and wild promise to well to pretty much every God that has ever claimed holiness, it occurred to Dave to have another look at his plant book. In his enthusiasm, Dave had failed to turn to page two. He turned the page and read the rest of the story. Indian turnip, he read, a close relation of the horseradish. When cooked, it is a mild and pleasant vegetable.

When eaten raw, it's the hottest plant known in the Northwoods. The First Nations used to feed it to early settlers whenever they wanted a giggle. Painful, but not poisonous. and this is where we move back to the world of fiction. That night Dave got drunk at the... Okay, perhaps not right away. But soon. At night Dave got drunk at the Red Pine Inn.

Next day, he gave the plant book away to the hike and trip director. That night, after the kids were in bed, Dave came downstairs with the camping booklet. There are camps with rifle ranges, he said. We're not sending Margo somewhere where they arm the campers. I knew you could handle this, said Morley. Dave chose a camp that didn't have power boats. No water skiing, he said to Margo, no horses either.

A small, quiet camp with a lake and sailboats, a summer place. What Margo really wanted, of course, was to go to camp with Stephanie. But Stephanie was going to a teenage camp And for the first time ever To a camp with boys They all left the next Monday morning A morning that was as chaotic as Christmas Sam packed comic books and no clothes

Stephanie thumped downstairs With a trunk and a suitcase And a sports bag full of stuff She wasn't talking to anybody Mad about something nervous if truth be told Dave looked at her across the breakfast table, scowling into her cereal ball, and his heart went out to the boys in whose life his daughter was about to march. Somewhere he thought some poor kid is calmly eating breakfast with no idea what's heading his way.

Margo was the last to leave. Dave drove her to the parking lot of a suburban shopping center after lunch. She was wearing blue shorts, a white t-shirt, and a scarf in her hair. Last Dave saw of her. She was on a bus with a lot of other kids. Margot was sitting alone at the back of the bus, all the other kids, clapping their hands and singing. Margo, she had her hands in her lap and was staring dead ahead.

For the first few days the kids were gone. Dave was edgy. I don't get it, he said. You're worried about them, said Morley. Margot's the one I'm worried about, said Dave. In the morning, he'd wake up, say, wonder how she's doing. Morley would say, she's doing fine.

And pathetically, that would make everything okay, make Dave feel better. But it never lasted. An hour later, he'd be all fretting again. First letter arrived at the beginning of their second week away. Dear Uncle Dave, this place is torture. Get me out of here. The meals are horrible.

I haven't eaten anything for two days. They serve old porridge in the morning. My counselor's name is Phyllis. She looks like Igor. I got bit by some weird, looking bug and my arm is swelling up and turning red. Lovin kisses your niece, Margo. Dave was horrified.

She's fine, said Morley. Dave said she's starving. What if she gets so hungry, she goes into the woods and pulls a poised plant out of the ground and eats it? Morley, who was already in bed, didn't even pretend to stop reading. Dave, she said, only an idiot would go into the woods and pull up a plant and eat it. No one's that stupid. On Monday, Dave came home at lunch

and saw an envelope addressed in Stephanie's handwriting. Dave's heart was filled with the milk of human kindness when he saw it. Kids had been gone 12 days now. He was worried about Margot, but he missed Stephanie. So he carried that envelope over to the kitchen table and sat down and held it up and put it down, and then he got up and walked across. crossed the kitchen and opened the fridge, poured himself some juice.

He was savoring the moment. Delayed pleasure. Dave was old enough to know that sometimes anticipation is as good as anything gets. And so he sat there for a while anticipating the ladder and then he opened it. There are boys everywhere, it began. Boys, boys, boys. This camp is boy heaven.

mostly they're pretty lame except there's this guy Larry who was 18 in a lifeguard and a hunk and last night last night Dave stopped reading and stared out the kitchen window the letter seemed to be heading to a place he didn't want to go

he didn't want to know about last night glanced down at the pages on the table in front of him and then he began to read again from the very beginning July the seventh, dear Becky. Becky is Stephanie's best friend. Dave stared at the greeting of that letter as the awful truth came slowly into focus. His daughter had put the letter that she had written to her friend Becky into the envelope she had addressed to her parents. It was seven pages long.

I don't need to read this, thought Dave. This letter was not meant for me. Please, Lord, give me the strength not to read this letter. Lead me not into temptation, stop me from reading any further, deliver me from evil. And his eyes flicked down at the page in front of him and he thought he saw the word tongue. And he looked away quickly, Lord, he said, why are you testing me like this? And as being Dave's experience, during a long and confusing life. But the best way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it. And he sat there at the table, fidgeting with the letter.

And then, without looking at it, he thought of his little girl as sweet as summer. And then not sure at all that he was doing the right thing, he folded it, and put it back in the envelope. And he got up from the table, and he carried it across the kitchen the way he might have carried a dead mouse, holding it out away from his body. And he dropped it in the garbage can below the sink. And he never mentioned it again, ever, not to... to his wife when she came home that night, not to his daughter when she came home from camp,

and not to his daughter's friend Becky when she came visiting at Summer's End. Only sure of one thing. If he was doing the right thing, he was doing it for the wrong reason. He was acting out of cowardice, not courage. He fretted all night. He phoned Margot's camp

the next morning. A woman answered the phone. Dave said, I'm phoning about my niece. I was wondering how she's doing. She's an Igor's tent. The lady at the other end of the phone said, Who? Dave hung up.

On Wednesday, he couldn't stand it any longer. I'm going to drive up to see her, he said. Margot's camp was a two-hour drive north. Parked his car and the visitor's parking lot at the camp gate. There were no other cars there. And he started off down the dirt road toward camp.

There was a lake beside the road on his left, a forest on his right. It was a beautiful summer afternoon. The sky blew, the clouds white and blowing. Warm wind off the lake. City was so hot,

so sticky. It wasn't hot here. He could hear children playing ahead of him around the bend and the road. He couldn't see them, but he could hear them. And then when he came to the bend, he saw a beach and a group of kids, swimming. From where he was, he could see down the length of the lake. Shadows of the clouds on the water was beautiful. More beautiful than he'd imagined.

And he stood there, and he drank it all in. He was about to walk down to the beach when he recognized one of the bathing suits. It was Margo. Margo standing at the dock end of the diving board. Margo laughing and pointing at a kid in the water. Margo running the length of the board and hurling herself into space,

grabbing her feet and tucking. Cannonball. They've stepped off the road so no one would see him. And he stood there, among the trees and watched his niece playing, watched her get out of the lake all legs and arms, tighten herself into a towel, and pick her barefoot way along the same road

that he was standing beside. And he felt foolish. Morley was right again. Margot was fine. She was better than fine. And that was good. enough for Dave. He was fine too. He headed back to the car. His family was growing up. And like always, they were a few steps ahead of him. That was Stuart McLean with Letter from Camp.

All right, that's it for today. But we'll be back here next week with two more Dave and Morley stories. Sam called Eugene in his throaty whisper, waving his spotted arm in the air. If it was a slide they needed, he had a better one. It was in his shed. He was pretty sure. Sam, he called again, coughing and spitting on the ground, gesturing at the shed at the bottom of the garden. The boys came over, and he led them around his wife, Maria's flower bed, past. his famous fig tree under the grape arbor between the rows of peppers and tomatoes and into the earthy cool of his shaded shed. When his watery eyes adjusted to the light, he started them moving stuff around, an old refrigerator, a bureau, two hand-pushed lawnmowers. It was dirty work,

and they were getting hot and irritated because they didn't understand what he was up to. Until they unearthed it, until Eugene stepped back and beamed and they stood there in the sticky darkness without saying a word. Struck dumb. Staring into the back corner a Eugene shed as if they had just uncovered the gold mask of Tootun Common. The greatest treasure they could imagine. A huge, long, plastic tube, a portable industrial garbage chute. The thing you use, the same. the sort of thing you use when you're renovating houses to slide debris from the second floor to the yard.

That's where the shoot came from. They'd been trying to build a water slide that ran from the back deck down to the garden. A little slide, a modest drop. But by the time they had finished, by the time they had heaved the enormous plastic tube out of Eugene's shed and dropped it over the fence, they had heaved modesty out the window. This water slide didn't start on the deck. This water slide was the water slide to end all water slides. This water slide began at the second floor bathroom window.

It traversed the family room roof, looped around the clothesline pole, rolled over the picnic table, and ended in the back garden near the pear tree. That's next week on the podcast, and next to week will be our final episode of the season. So I really hope you'll join us. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the Apostrophe Podcast Network. The recording engineer is I thought I saw the word tongue, Greg DeClute. Theme music is by Danny Michelle, and the show is produced by Louise Curtis, Greg DeClute, and me, Jess Milton. Let's see. Let's see. meet again next week for one last show of the season. Until then, so long for now.