It seems good to have some summer weather. I think we had four fires in the woodstove during the month of June, and while adding a piece of wood to the last one, I burned the tip of my thumb. It blistered and was pretty sore for a while, but it reminded me of Ray Norton.
Ray was a Canadian who had worked in logging camps and as a guide in northern Ontario. Our family met his in 1952 while camping in the Adirondack mountains. Our families hit it off so well that we continued to meet twice a year, once at Niagara Falls for a picnic, and the other time at a campground in the mountains.
One summer we met at Lewis Lake, only to discover that there were no unclaimed campsites. We were advised by the park ranger that there were some cleared rough sites (no outhouses or piped water) a few miles farther down the road. That vacation was a wonderful one, as we had a small lake all to ourselves, but my clearest memory of it was that Ray produced an old guitar and played and sang songs of the Canadian north woods as we watched the campfire crackle and burn. It was there that I learned the songs Barbry Allen and The Frozen Logger.
Maybe you’re wondering what burning my finger on the woodstove has to do with camping, so I’ll tell you. When you are learning to play the guitar, you gradually develop calluses on your fingertips and eventually pressing down on metal strings doesn’t give you sore fingers. Ray didn’t get his calluses that way. He said he simply touched his fingers to the hot woodstove, and now I know exactly what he meant. Once the raw soreness eased, my thumb was left with a pretty tough callus. Too bad that’s the one digit on my left hand that isn’t necessary for forming chords!
Wizened Wizard 