My mother was in elementary school when my grandfather, affectionately known as Bump, created a family haven along a foothill of the Worcester Range, a camp with a caboose, a dining cart, an asphalt pool, and Bump and Nanny's glorious garden. The camp remains in the family to this day, a wondrous place filled with delight. Here is an excerpt about the story of the caboose from A Mother's Prayer.
My mother was a swimmer from a very young age. Her father, Charles Morrell, affectionately known as Bump, bought more than thirty acres of land along the Worcester Range in Vermont, with the intent of turning the property into a summer camp. He dug a large hole, covered it with asphalt, dammed a nearby brook, ran pipes down a hill, and gravity fed the deep, asphalt hole with water, a pool heated by the sun. Then Bump put a wooden dining cart and a wooden caboose, which he acquired from Central Vermont Railway, the company he worked for, on the property. The railroad company was going to burn the decommissioned dining cart and caboose. My grandfather offered to pay for them, but a station manager told Bump, If you get a flatbed truck to haul them away, you can have them for free.
My grandfather obtained a flatbed truck and carved out a small slice of paradise for his entire family, a summer camp that came to be known as The Caboose, only a five-minute drive or a fifteen-minute bike ride from the family home in Waterbury, Vermont, where my mother spent her entire life until she married my father. Years of swimming at The Caboose exposed my mother’s skin to a corruptive sun. Then, while in high school, my mother spent her summers as a lifeguard at the community pool. She swam and swam and swam, with only a cap and a suit, her body lathered with oil while sunlight radiated on the very waters she was raised in.