Sun Burn, Vinegar and Fire

The final day of the family trip to #Old Orchard Beach looked promising. We stayed in a wood cabin motel in Jefferson, New Hampshire just across Highway #2 from a famous local attraction. Trading on America’s fascination with the American West, was #Six-Gun City. With its wood facade stores and dusty main street, it replicated a typical western town in the late 19th century. There was a Sherrif’s office and jail, a saloon in a sleezy hotel. A couple of locals dressed as cowboys rode their horses down the main street. The cowboys and the horses’ manure lent an aura and an aroma of authenticity on this hot Sunday summer morning.

Six-Gun City staged familiar movie re-enactments as a memorable customer experience. At regular intervals, the “bad guys” robbed the bank and ran into the street shooting blanks in the air, before jumping on their horses and “hightailing it” out of town to the delight of the visitors.

At mid-day, there was the “showdown at high noon”. The sheriff faced off against a bad guy gunning down his opponent to the delight of the tourists licking ice cream and chewing strawberry licorice sticks. The stagecoach robbery capped the visit. My parents and grandmother loaded us on board an authentic old stagecoach and meandered off. There was Phil age 12, me at 8, sister Candy 7 and a bewildered 5-year-old “FuFu”, as we called our younger sister for her habit of snuffling her nose while sucking her thumb.

Before the stage made it out of town, a group of masked “bandidos” rode up alongside and “held up” the stagecoach. Looking fierce, they clambered into the cab threatening the passengers and demanding to know where “the gold was stashed.” My terrified sisters immediately burst into tears but 12-year-old Philip, fully caught up in the scene, pulled the recently purchased souvenir “Bowie Knife” out of his belt. Their eyes locked, the actor concerned that the kid might actually try something with his knife. After a brief silence, the bandit turned away leaving Philip with the impression that he had saved the day. This illusion has stayed with Phil to this day.

Towards mid-afternoon, we clambered back into the big black Chevie and rolled down the road to Old Orchard Beach. My distinct memory of the town was a series of gray wooden buildings on a main drag parallel to the beach. This road led to its famous pier. Along the walkway were food stands and a miniature golf concession. Its holes featured little plywood windmills slapped with barn paint. On the pier, we begged for candy apples and cotton candy and wandered about tripping over the pier’s wooden slats, intermittently losing track of our oblivious parents strolling ahead. One highlight was “saltwater taffy” a curious local confection. It came in various pale colours with a consistency guaranteed to remove fillings and loose teeth.

We eventually worked our way back to the hotel. Even as a child I recognized the “Ocean View Hotel” as a fire trap. Four stories connected by steep wooden stairways. There were no elevators. Many signs warned residents against trying to save a few bucks by cooking meals over open fires in their rooms. I don’t recall the presence of sprinklers, but each floor had a large rusty fire extinguisher of uncertain age. I was assigned to sleep in the same bed as my grandmother. Lying on a thin mattress over a coiled bed spring, my grandmother’s weight pulled me irrevocably towards her sweating mass. The thin sheets were incapable of absorbing the moisture in this un air-conditioned room on a sweltering summer night.

The next day, we bee lined for the beach along with hundreds of other Canadian visitors, hoping to set our towels and umbrellas within sight of the surf. We raced towards the water and gasped in pain when the first frigid wave broke over our thin pale bodies. North Atlantic seawater rolled onto the beach from Maine’s Saco Bay, suggesting a deceptive picture of Florida beach fun. The reality was that the water was so frigid that almost no-one could stand in it, let alone swim.

We spent the day stretched out on blankets, kicking a beach ball into the water and daring each other to retrieve it, hopping about our blue extremities slowly regaining natural colour. Occasionally, I watched as a mother buried baby poop in the sand. Lunchtime brought out picnic hampers and sandy sandwiches consumed pretty close to the buried treasure. A little more splashing in the water and crying over various minor injuries helped pass the afternoon. Then we strolled the promenade for a stand-up dinner of hot dogs or “Michigan red hots” (hot dogs with hamburger chili) and fries.

Returning to the hotel, I walked into a disaster. Grandmother Clara, who had baked in the sun for 10 hours, was now splashing her favoured remedy, white vinegar over the glowing red sunburn covering all of her exposed skin. This represented a lot of body surface area. The combination of the heat, her skin and the vinegar produced a choking acid smell. Breathing was a painful stinging experience, but no amount of begging would convince my parents to let me stay in their hotel room.

Was there an actual hotel fire or did I merely conjure up the nightmare of the adjacent hotel building going up in flames with occupants jumping from the top floors into nets held by cluster of firemen at ground level? It was a relief when I learned that the 5 days were up and all we had was 16 hours of driving before we could get home and into my own bed.

By this time, my father, who was in the lighting fixture business, decided to bring home a lampshade as a commercial sample. Bernie, an engineer, solved the problem of transporting the shade in the crowded vehicle by planning to have Clara wear it over her head for the entire trip. For some reason, Clara accepted this indignity in preference to taking the bus home. To make matters worse, brother Phil had come down with a high fever and lay limp across Clara’s lap in the backseat.

Somewhere in New Hampshire, the #State Police pulled my dad over for speeding. Adjusting his Stetson hat. The officer strode up to my father’s window and asked the traditional; “Where’s the fire, mister?” My Dad explained about the lampshade, his mother-in-law and the child with the high fever. The trooper took a long look at the scene in the back seat and waved off a ticket saying: “It looks like you’ve already got enough trouble, mister. Just try to stay within the speed limit”.