It took some doing to become a hutman. Like Day
One, when my first job was to clean some rooms and the bathroom in the lodge,
now the Joe Dodge Lodge. There was none of the orientation which today’s crews
get on a host of important topics. Nothing, except the location of brooms
, bucket and mop. Those morning hours went by s-l-o-w-l-y.
Then life picked up and for the summers of ’36 and ’37 I worked at Pinkham,
for ’38 and ’39 at Madison. The mop, the broom and the bucket were basic throughout.
But, using today’s godawful phrase, there was "much much more".
Take the donkeys. They were the transport which got the huts equipped: the
blankets, any new or replacement equipment, fuel for cooking, basic foods
(almost always in cans). In the late ‘20’s some thirty donkeys were shipped
from New Mexico and quartered at the foot of the Greenleaf trail. Joe Dodge
had rounded up a former mule- skinner in a remote Maine village to start the
process. But by my time he had been replaced by sturdy New Hampshire men
such as "Neighbor" George Harris and his brother Winnie. In winter the donks
lived on the Harris farm in Whitefield.
May and June were critical months for the donks and the huts. My image is
of a string of those durable animals on a steamy day churning up a muddy stretch
of the Valley Way, surrounded by a swarm of mosquitoes and black flies led,
by a couple of swearing sweating honchos as skinners. We didn’t envy either
man or beast.
My other image of the donks is second hand from a later generation. It pictures
the donks, under the banner of the WHITE MOUNTAIN JACKASS COMPANY and guided
by some scruffy looking hutmen, occupying a centerpiece position in
Gorham’s annual 4th of July parade.
While the donkeys helped greatly to put the huts in business, it is the
people who hold rich spots in my memory. People like Tony Samuelson, Ed Ramey,
Rod Woodward, Al Folger, Noble McClintock, "Popeye" Arsenault ( One day the
phone rang. His wife said, "Is Ernest Arsenault there? I thought she said,"Is
there any snow up there?" I never heard the end of that). Those men were
at Pinkham. Then there were big names in the huts on the ridge, names like
Bob Ohler and Don Allen, or at Carter Notch where Charley Rogers and Schlitz
Sargent held forth. A real highlight for me that first summer was an invitation
from Ohler and Allen to go through the Mahoosucs with them in one day. We
almost did, but it was one of the four times in my life when I have "hit
the wall" and we had to bail out in Shelburne. I simply couldn’t keep
up with their pace
These were some of the people. But there were many more including my special
friend Parker Brownell and the 1939 Madison Hut crew of Bill Appel, Ben Cole,
Bob Temple and me.
But the unique fact about the huts is that all seven hut crews took
the buildings, the supplies and the guests and for the short span of
100 days turned them into centers of life and warmth, hard toil and humor,
with moments of peril, even death, set among high altitude piles of
rock or remote stands of spruce and hemlock. For one hundred days each year
each hut came alive, took on its own image. Then nine months of silence
before the cycle was repeated. |
O H Association