An Embarrassment of Riches. James Howard Kunstler
a task of infernal vigilance keeping to the channel and avoiding snags. For with the spring flood, dangerous debris littered the water like bones in a chowder. Monstrous tree trunks rolled up from the roiling depths like sea serpents of the vasty deep. Almost everywhere, smaller limbs stuck out of the water like the spars of a thousand sunken yawls. Often they denoted submerged islands that would rise above water in midsummer and bloom with wild flowers. Frequently we felt our hull scrape ominously against them. Uncle and I would glance anxiously across the cabin roof from our posts at the sweeps, expecting imminent calamity. Other times we heard a sinister musical creaking as a submerged snag bent and gave way under the force of our heavy keel.
By sunset that first day, we rounded the wan little hamlet of Monaca at the first big bend of the Ohio, and hove to shore off the northern bank in a quiet eddy below the outlet of the Beaver River. Here we anchored, waded to shore, and made fast our craft between two stout chestnut trees. Uncle remained ashore to botanize, whilst I set about securing us a supper. Not less than a minute after I had flung a salt-pork-baited hook over the side did my line tauten with such a jerk as almost fetched me headlong over the gunwale. I had caught many a sea bass in the waters off my home, and even sharks, but none fought like the monster here on my line. For half an hour the combat was joined, I running all around our little deck as the invisible brute sounded ’neath the hull. My palms, already a mass of blisters from a day at the sweeps, ran red with blood. At last my opponent gave up his struggle and I hauled him up from the muddy netherworld like a great sodden timber. So affrighted was I to see his gaping, bewhiskered jaws that I quick snatched a pistol and beat him about the head as we would club a shark back home to ensure his subjugation. I was another quarter hour hoisting him aboard. He proved to be not any ravening shark, of course, but a superlative catfish (Ictalurus furcatus) as big as a calf. I soon had him skinned and filleted—flinging the offals to a flotilla of honking grebes (Podilymbus podiceps). I fired the iron brazier on our foredeck, and by the time Uncle returned with his pouchful of specimens, our supper was aromatically roasting.
“Look, Sammy!” he exclaimed, producing in one hand a little yellow blossom, and in the other a pink. “A new species of Potentilla! And Corydalis too!”
“Hurrah!” I congratulated him. My zest for things botanical never was the equal of Uncle’s, but I was happy for his jubilation. To him, the most trifling weed took on heroic grandeur, particularly when he thought himself to be its discoverer.
“Barely one full day outbound, and already are we two species richer. Why, I feel like a man at large in El Dorado, gold everywhere underfoot! Does thee realize, nephew, that at this rate we might find virtually hundreds of new species? What—halloo! Why, hurrah for thee, boy! What succulent is this a’roasting?”
“’Tis a catfish, Uncle.”
“And where didst thee get him?”
“Not at market, I assure you, sir.”
“O, Sammy, ’tis a fine delicacy! And a mild evening, and a glorious end on our first day abroad. Let’s to the trenchers, eh? My backbone is a’touching my belly!”
And so did we pass our first night aboard the keelboat, by mutual consent named Megatherium (for its massive, lumbering beauty as much as its being the raison d’être of our expedition). Picking our teeth after the feast, we listened to the evening song of the Ohio: waterfowls quacking in the reeds, the millionfold chorus of peeping froglets, the horned owl hooting in the nearby forest, and the plangent cries of wolves ranging distantly in the hills beyond the river valley. Beyond the embers of our little brazier teemed a billion beings, proclaiming themselves in as many notes and tunes. In a little while, the moon rose above the eastering hills, lustrous, lucent with mystery. Nighthawks swerved against the glowing disc.
“Well,” said I to hear a human voice amid all these animal croakings, quacking, howlings, wingings, and hootings, “’tisn’t like home, is it, Uncle?”
“Thee will get used to it, Sammy,” Uncle said. “Hear that wolf pack yonder?”
“Yes.” I drew my blanket up beneath my chin. My head rested upon a sack of Pennsylvania cornmeal. “Do you think we shall find him, Uncle?”
“Him…?”
“Megatherium.”
He chortled and sighed. “Perhaps. ’Tis a big, empty continent, my boy.”
“It does not sound empty to me, Uncle,” I shuddered. He remained silent. “How long do you think our search shall require?”
“’Tis hard to say. When we reach Indian country we shall inquire of the savages thereabouts and perhaps employ a gang to get our specimen. Why, ’pon my ramble to the Niagara, I found the Tuscaroras very helpful at the price of a few trinkets.”
“Are you not afraid in a wild country, Uncle?”
“’Tis an acquired taste, I suppose—but O how savory when once acquired. Some of the happiest days of my life were those summer weeks in Labrador, alone amongst the puffins and the bears.”
“I would have gone mad with loneliness.”
“I was never idle for a moment; I never stopped to think about it.”
“It is a thing beyond my power to comprehend.”
“Perhaps thee will learn to comprehend it in the weeks ahead.”
My belly tightened. A shooting star etched a trail across the blue-black dome of sky.
“Look,” he said.
“Another angel, fallen from grace” said I. “How is it we never find them lying where they fall, Uncle? Broken-winged like sparrows in the road.”
“They fall through the earth, Sammy,” Uncle replied in all earnestness. “To the bad place.”
“Through the earth? Clear through to the other side?”
“Of course not.”
“To the center then? Is that where hell is located?”
“’Tis an ether of the spirit. Of mind.”
“And heaven?”
“Likewise.”
“And God?”
“Yes …?”
“Where does he dwell?”
“Why, everywhere.”
“I was taught that he dwelt in heaven.”
“Had thy father kept his Quaker faith, thee would have learned where God doth dwell and how.”
“Perhaps the earth is an ether of spirit. How do you know you are not dreaming right now?”
“Because I hear thy lips flapping.”
“How do you know you’re not dreaming it?”
“Enough, thou atheist clod. Goodnight.”
Soon he was snoring. I lay beneath my blanket long into that fiercely beautiful night, listening to the cries of beasts and the water gently laving our boat. At length I too succumbed to slumber and dreamed of home; but someone in the dream called it heaven, and I believed it was.
For the next week, we floated downstream in perfect weather, pausing where we pleased to make botanical forays on shore, as carefree as two runaway boys off on a lark. We soon “got the hang” of steering our boat with the sweeps, though practice did not improve its inherent clumsiness as a craft. My blisters became calluses. My face and hands turned brown in the sunshine. My back grew strong.
The settlements were sparse after Wheeling, but it was exciting to think that the far bank was the half-wild state of Ohio, and we landed on its shore so I could say I had been there. The individual farmsteads along the shore grew likewise fewer and farther between, while the houses took on a more rough-hewn character and their fields were still full of stumps. Many long stretches of the river now contained no signs of settlement at all, but pale columns