An Embarrassment of Riches. James Howard Kunstler

      Prologue

      In the spring of 1803, I, Samuel Walker, and my Uncle William were sent by President Jefferson into the wilderness between the Ohio River and the Gulf of Mexico to find specimens of the animal called the giant sloth. This is the record of that misadventure, whose strange annals are otherwise lost to history.

      I was born at Grandfather’s farm, Owl’s Crossing, outside Philadelphia on the River Schuylkill, in the year that the Articles of Peace certified our nation’s independence, 1783. The toils of farming did not suit my father, John Walker, and so four years later our portion of the family moved to the village of Oyster Bay, Long Island, where my father entered the mercantile trade and prospered.

      I was an unremarkable boy, perhaps a little headstrong with my playmates after suffering the tyranny of two older brothers. I joined in all the youthful recreations of the day, fished for sea trout off Lloyd’s Neck, played at “Indians” in the cornfields above the Sound, or at “Hessians and Continentals,” adventured in the hardwood groves of our paradisical township in search of bear and panther, long exterminated, and shot whole thundering herds of bison—they looked suspiciously like cows—with my broomstick musket.

      From age eight to sixteen I attended an academy in our village operated by the erudite but clownish Venetian, Constantine Lupino, beloved butt of a thousand pranks of the practical kind, florid-faced, round-bellied in his bursting, ink-spotted waistcoat, spouting the most gorgeously incomprehensible oaths at us boys as he found yet another frog or snake or stinking sea robin in the drawer where he kept his lesson book. I scraped by at Greek and Latin, enjoyed vastly Dante and Shakespeare, and daydreamed through the dreary Bunyon and his plodding pilgrim. Mathematics left me flummoxed. My passion above all was painting, and as the years advanced I happily forsook the company of my playmates to ramble the woods and shores with my sketchbook.

      My father, a kind and liberal gentleman, did not press me to labor in his store, which flourished as New York City rose in influence. But when I wished to work behind Papa’s counters, it was always at a rate of pay equal to that of his clerks. I suppose it was his generous way of prompting my interest in the family business, for brother Charles already treaded the righteous path toward the ministry, while brother James’s love of ships and ballistics had already propelled him toward that fatal appointment with a salvo of grapeshot aboard the armed yawl Repulse on Lake Champlain, 1814.

      At eighteen, I enrolled at Columbia College in the sylvan heights of upper Manhattan, there to study philosophy and the nascent sciences toward a useful career in God-knows-what. The first year, hoping not to disappoint my father, I applied myself in all fields of study with astounding success (even at the calculus!). But the next, following a disastrous love affair in the intervening summer, I neglected my lectures, forsook even my sketchpad, and wandered the gloomy cliffs