An Embarrassment of Riches. James Howard Kunstler
the days wore on, the sun’s strong rays brought forth all the furled foliage of the hardwoods and many a bright spring blossom. Deer disported along the banks, heron and other great fisher-birds skimmed the silvery surface for glittering fish. Often we saw bears grubbing at the water’s edge. Sometimes the strange illusion struck me that our boat was still while all the world went by in slow and stately motion. Time itself no longer reigned as tyrant to a workaday world. It became water, light, wing, and fin, an ether of the spirit, of mind.
I awoke on deck one morning to the unpleasing sensation of raindrops pelting my face. A chill gripped the air, my breath issued in steamy huffs, while a dreary mist blanketed the river, obscuring the shore not twenty yards from our anchorage. Even the ever-teeming creatures of the riparian world lay silent and concealed in their holes, nests, or dens. I set about kindling a fire in our brazier, hoping to make a pot of cornmeal porridge. But as soon as I arranged my tinder and struck my flint, the main deluge commenced as though a million water buckets were overturned at once. We rushed down the companionway into the hold. It was less a cabin than a mere cargo bin. For the rest of the day, we stayed inside, I writing in my journal and reading from our copy of The Navigator, that indispensable guidebook of the Ohio River traveler, while Uncle made botanical notes and snoozed. Night turned mere gloom to oppression. We supped on soggy biscuits. I prayed for a return to sunshine and fell asleep.
In the morning it was still raining.
“That’s it. I’ll not spend another day in here,” quoth Uncle, at his rope’s end. We cut an extra blanket in half, poked holes in the center of each half, rubbed them with lard, and thus contrived two foul-weather capes. Then we went outside, cast off from the mooring, and hove out into the current. The rain persisted hour after hour. By noon I was numb. We were about to give up for the day and find another place to tie up when we were accosted from the gray distance by a family signaling distress off the tip of an island up ahead. As we closed on them, we descried three figures. A man in a dark coat stood waving a lantern that shone brightly in the gloom. A woman stood at his side in wind-blown skirts and bonnet. Clutched to her leg was a small figure, their child. Soon we could see that they were all clinging to the slanted poop deck of a wrecked flatboat lodge [O1]on a sand shoal far enough off the island’s head as to place in peril someone ignorant of the art of swimming. We made straight for these stranded unfortunates, their cries of “help!” ringing in our ears above the wind.
It was not until our own boat lodged upon that same shoal with a groan of creaking timbers that I noted the true condition of their craft: it was, in fact, an ancient derelict, its half-swamped hull bereft of paint, its gunwales moss-encrusted, and even a few saplings sprouting from its roofless cabin. It was as riddled with worm holes as a Switzer cheese. Thus, it had lain upon this shoal for several years at least.
“Heave out the anchor, Sammy!” Uncle cried through the rising gale.
“We are already aground,” I cried back.
Just then, Megatherium lurched forward and struck the hull of the derelict. Trembling with cold and terror, I heaved out the anchor. The three figures remained in view. Moments later they made for our abutting boat, and with an avidity strange in ones seeming to have suffered long exposure to the elements. The “father” seized Uncle by his greasy rain-cloak. The man was a colossus, looming two feet in height above Uncle. He wore an old cocked hat secured to his head with a filthy scarf tied under his great knob of a chin. The two others made for me, the “wife” seizing my throat and the “child” my ankles. I hurtled backward down the companionway into the hold and struck my head on something hard.
When I regained consciousness minutes later, Uncle and I were being bound by our attackers. It was then I saw, in the obscurity of the place, that the “child” was no such thing, but an odious black-eyed dwarf with a nose so flat and oft-broken that it resembled an ape’s. Upon his head was a battered tin hat of the sort worn by drummer boys in the War of Independence. The “wife” finished her knots and looked up ’neath her soiled bonnet. She was the proprietress of an harelip so frightful that she might have been described by a zoologist as being a species distinct from humankind. To make matters worse, she smiled and then attempted speech. But whatever she said it is lost to posterity, for I heard only a resonant honk punctuated by whistling, flapping noises—the sound a goose might make if it could play upon a pennywhistle. The dwarf laughed, howling like a fyce.
“Sammy,” Uncle said in a calm tone while the storm shrieked outside and the three horrible faces pressed in upon us like so many ghouls in a midnight churchyard, “I am afraid we have fallen into the company of villains.”
Goliath untied the filthy rag of a scarf and doffed his tricorn with a flourish.
“Captain Melancton Bilbo et famille at your service, gentlemen,” he said.
His breath was so foul, like unto the rectified essence of all the swine yards ever in creation, that I fell into a swoon.
When I returned once again to lucidity, Uncle was hurling objurgations at our captors whilst they rifled our supplies.
“Mongrels! Caitiffs! Execrable filth! Thou stools of Pluto …!”
“’Tis one of the blind bargains of our honorable profession, Neddy,” Captain Bilbo observed to the dwarf, “that we excite the poetical in those with whom, however briefly, we form an acquaintance.”
“… carrion beetles! Blowflies!”
“I like a man who ain’t afraid to hoist an opinion,” Bilbo went on. “We are become already a nation of suck-ups and sycophants.”
“Worthless dregs—!”
“Yes, even that, sir. But I have high hopes, as I know we all do, for the future of democracy and our national character. What have you found there, Neddy?”
The repulsive dwarf was emitting sharp cries of excitement, not unlike those of a barking spaniel. Bilbo reached for the wretch’s shirtcollar with his skillet-sized hands and spun him ’round.
“Why, you lucky little fellow! If it ain’t a box of chocolate filberts!”
“Villain, those are mine!” I exclaimed.
“You would begrudge the poor, misbegotten lad an instant of happiness in a life fraught with heartache and tribulation?” Bilbo rebuked me, then slapped the mongrel resoundingly beside the head, knocking his tin hat askew. “Share them with Bessie, now. Don’t be a little piggy.”
The harelip plunged both hands into the box and crammed the hideous aperture in the center of her face with the sweetmeats. Outside, the gale howled like a chorus of demons. Bilbo resumed his ransacking of the forward compartment.
“What are these?” he asked, shoving backward the crate of cork-stoppered glass jars.
“Specimen containers, thou plundering maggot. Careful!”
“Hmmmm. What a fine chest—hold! Why, split my windpipe! What’s this? A cask!”
Bilbo seized the oak barrel and dislodged it from its niche among the other stores. So prodigious was his physical strength that he lifted the thing—which must have weighed upward of an hundred pounds—as easily as a normal man might take up a firkin of butter. Then, using his dagger and pistol butt as the bungstarter, he pounded a hole in the barrel end.
“By the great horn spoon!” he cried. “Whiskey!”
At this juncture, the brigandage of these scum was at once suspended whilst all three attended to the providential cask, Bilbo sipping with great sighs of satisfaction from a specimen jar, held as a jigger, daintily, between thumb and forefinger. So intent were they upon their guzzling that in less than half an hour the trio was dead drunk and asleep at our bound ankles. Struggle as we might, though, we did not succeed in escaping our bonds, and night soon engulfed us like a very mantle of doom. The darkness, the wailing storm, the drunken snores and stink of our captors, the creaking and groaning of our stranded hull straining against the relentless current of the storm-swollen river, all combined to produce the direst anxiety.
“O,