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BY THEN I HAD seen sixteen hundred miles’ worth of towns, from Palookavilles to the Twin Cities busy as double beehives to gray soppy Milwaukee spiked with churches. At this first sight of Manitowoc, though, I did not know what to think. The houses looked old, many of them small and with gray siding, on streets with some flower gardens fringing the lawns but none of the overtowering cottonwood groves of Gros Ventre or Great Falls. Nothing about the tight-packed neighborhoods appeared even remotely familiar except Chevys and Fords dotting the streets, and those were strangely pulled in sideways—parallel parking had not converted Montana. Plenty of church steeples here, too, like arrow tips in the hide of the sky. As for the people out and about, they were not as dressed up as in Minneapolis, yet the women looked like they had on nylons, which not even Meredice Williamson wore on an everyday basis at the ranch, and the men sported hats that would scarcely keep the sun off at all, not a Stetson among them.
My eyes stayed busy as could be, my mind trying to keep up with all the different sights and scenes—Gram had been right about that, I had to admit—as the bus approached the more active downtown section, with long lines of mystifying storefronts. We passed a business calling itself a SCHNAPPS SCHOP, which looked like a bar, and the bars I could recognize all had a glowing blue neon sign in the window proclaiming SCHLITZ, THE BEER THAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS, which was news to me—it hadn’t done so in Montana—while what looked like restaurants commonly had the word SCHNITZEL painted on the plate glass, and an apparent department store had SCHUETTE’S, a very strange-sounding product if it wasn’t a name, spelled in large letters above its show windows. I was no whiz at other languages, but I had the awful growing suspicion that if ghosts walked in Manitowoc, they had better speak German to find their way around this weird town.
Like a thunderclap following that realization, the bus rumbled across a drawbridge over a murky river, with half-killed weeds clinging to its banks, and on past huge shed-like buildings with signs saying they were enterprises unknown to me, such as boiler works and coal yards. Fortunately I caught a reassuring glimpse of a sparkling gray-blue lake that spilled over the horizon, and the best thing that had yet come into sight, a tremendously long red-painted ship in the harbor with ORE EMPRESS in big white letters on its bow.
Then the bus was lurching into the driveway of the depot, and the next thing I knew, the driver killed the engine, swung around in his seat with relief written on his face, and announced:
“Manitowoc, the pearl of Lake Michigan. Everybody off.”
I was thunderstruck, but not for long.
“HEY, NO, EVERYBODY SIT TIGHT! YOU’RE NOT THERE YET!”
My outcry halted the driver and probably everyone else on the bus. “You’re taking them to Camp Winniegoboo!” I instructed the open-mouthed man at the wheel. “They told me so!”
He recovered enough to sputter, “What’re you yapping about? A camp bus picks them up here.” I went numb. “They’re off my hands,” he briskly brushed those together, disposing of me at the same time. “Besides, what do you care? You’re ticketed to here like everybody else, aren’t you? End of the line, bub. Come on.”
I nodded dumbly, and followed him off the bus into the unloading area. There still was a chance, if I could grab my suitcase and hustle into the waiting room ahead of the throng of campers. But of course at Milwaukee mine had been the first one stowed in the baggage compartment, and as infallibly as Murphy’s Law that anything that can go wrong is bound to go wrong, every camping kid received his bag and filtered into the depot before the wicker suitcase was reached. Directly ahead, as I slogged in dead last, Kurt and his gang looked back and gave me various kinds of the stink eye, but stayed a safe distance away.
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