But this summer we allowed we all would get in the car and take a big trip out West ­go right into some of the parks, if nothing happened.

We borrowed our tent from the Hickory Bend Outing Club that Paw belongs to back home.  The poles go along the fenders and stick out a good way behind.  I could always cook without a stove, from experience at picnics when I was younger.  The dishes goes in a box.  Paw nailed a rack on top of the fenders, and we carry a lot of stuff that way.  Cynthy always has her suitcase on the outside because it’s the newest one.  The other girls set on the bedding on the rear seat, and I ride in front with Paw.  We mostly wear overalls.

Yes, times has changed, says Maw.

As a dispassionate observer in one of our national parks, expressing the belief in modern speech, I’ll say they have.  I have met Maw this summer, ninety thousand of her, concentrated on a piece of mountain scenery about fifty miles square ­Maw on her first vacation in a life of sixty years.  Dear old Maw!

Ninety thousand replicas of Maw cause the rest of us to eat copiously of alkaline dust and to shiver each time we approach a turn on the roads of Yellowstone Park, which were laid out on a curling iron.  You cannot escape seeing Paw and Maw, and Cynthy in her pants, and Hattie and Roweny in overalls and putties.  I have seen their camp fire rising on every remaining spot of grass on all that busy fifty miles.  I have photographed Maw and Cynthy and the other girls, and Cynthy has photographed me because I looked funny.  Bless them all, the whole ninety thousand of them ­I would not have missed them on their vacation this summer for all the world.  They are, I suppose, what we call the new people of America, who never have been out like this before.  They’ve been at home.  Maw has been getting the Sunday dinner.  Paw has been plowing, paying the taxes which this Government has spent for him.  But now Paw pays income tax also; and both he and Maw construe this fact to mean that they can at last read their title clear to a rest, and a car, and a vacation.  So they have swung out from the lane at last, after forty years of work, and on to the roads that lead to the transcontinental highway.  They have crossed the prairies and come up into the foothills ­the price of gas increasing day by day, and Paw kicking but paying cash ­and so they have at last arrived among the great mountains of which Maw has dreamed all her long life of cooking and washing and ironing.