THE summer after Wendell and Tanya were married, before they moved into quarters befitting his first teaching job at a Baptist college with mandatory daily chapel, they lived in a cabin on the Kentucky River bank—with kerosene for lamp light and butane for cooking & for heating water, which had to be hauled in a few gallons at a time. There wasn’t enough elbowroom in that cabin for more than a change of clothes, if you could find berth enough between the bed and everything else to get into them, but it was rendered spacious by the great excitement of their protracted honeymoon. Wendell had thrown himself into the preparations, repairing the screen and windows & doors, white washing the walls, cutting the weeds and generally shaping up the setting. It was called the Camp, a power place from his boyhood in nature, a locus of his independence from home rule, and for him the perfect summer hinge into his marriage. For Tanya it was something quite other, a crash course in just what she’d signed up for, until death do them part. Those of us fortunate enough to be watching joined the newlyweds in delight at the romance of it all. For his wedding present to his bride, Wendell toppled the old outhouse & built a new one—still without a door, as befit the view. Until that summer of 1957, Tanya’s idea of rustic was classy Mill Valley, California, where her professional aunts & uncles lived on a treed hillside a few minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge. For her wedding present to Wendell, twenty-one year old Queenie—for her striking resemblance to the profiled Nefertiti—rolled up her sleeves, got out the mosquito spray, and proceeded to figure out what the situation expected of her—so that she could exceed expectations. She multiplied that cabin space with fresh flowers, and turned the screened-in porch into a place to be, where everything happened. Wendell, who’d already made it into famous Poetry magazine and was on his quick way, wrote out there, on a folding card table in the corner, with a view of the old brown river. Overnighters slept on a narrow cot out there that during the day was a bolstered place to sit. And before we went to bed, we sat out there on the porch with the lamp turned low & watched fireflies and listened to the crickets and the tree frogs and the river, sometimes talking quietly but not always. In Wendell’s presence you understood without him saying anything that it was his well-thought-out conviction that there were often better things to listen to than humans, even those so distinguished and interesting as yourself. Owls, for instance, the sound of an owl would shut down conversation at the Camp. A towboat pushing barges upstream, for another. The Camp wasn’t just a quiet place, it was a place of quiet, where the click & clack of dishwashing in an enameled pan hung in the trees, sometimes welcome but not always, and where a speedboat was a messenger straight from hell, shoot the s.o.b. before he reproduces. Before light Wendell got up and put on his tall rubber boots, stealing down the slope to a johnboat tied up to a sycamore, & ran his trot lines, in the dark, as any poet for real would want to do. In the middle of the night once he hauled up a twenty-seven pound catfish, waking his bride to share in the excitement. Chunks of Ivory soap were used sometimes as bait.