Читать книгу An Embarrassment of Riches - James Howard Kunstler - Страница 8

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 above Spuyten Duyvil declaiming poetry after the style of Cowper. I soon adopted vices, squandered Papa’s stipends on shandygaffs in the city’s taverns, gambled at cards with classmates far richer and more experienced than I and lost, and, in short, educated myself not to the way of a gentleman but of an ass.

In January of that hapless year I was seen entering a theater by one of the Columbia masters. It was, at that time, against the rules to attend such corrupting entertainments. I was sternly warned to mend my ways. Three weeks later, I was espied buying a ticket to The Prince of Parthia and was expelled the next morning.

This disgrace quickly sobered my mind. I removed into the city proper and launched a career as a painter of miniature portraits. When I had exhausted distant relations as clients (mother’s great-aunt Mrs. Gribble, her niece the bovine Fanny Dawes) my commissions grew strangely scarce. Too short of coin now to attend the theaters, I haunted the coffeehouses where raged the political controversies of the day, and attached myself into the Hamiltonian fold—for like the great Bahamian bastard, I believed that a little democracy, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous thing. Had it gone on like this I might have abandoned my easel for the rough and tumble of politics, but a scheme for my rehabilitation had already been set into motion by Papa, and on a rainy March morning I received a letter from his brother, my uncle, summoning me to Owl’s Crossing, where “fruitful employment of a patriotic nature” was promised to “an ambitious and able-bodied young man eager to issue upon the world’s attention.”

Let me sketch for you a portrait of Uncle William as he stood in his garden under the white oak tree (Quercus alba) so many years ago.

He is dictating a letter intended for Professor Doctor Olaf Lagerlöf of Upsala, Sweden, heir to the university chair of the demigod Carolus Linnaeus, father of modern natural science. Why? Because this humble Quaker husbandman is himself the new nation’s preeminent botanist! A charter member of the American Philosophical Society, soldier in the War of Independence, friend of Dr. Rush, Charles Willson Peale, and Ben Franklin, correspondent to all the great scientific minds of his day, founder of the Philadelphia Society for the Recovery of the Recently Drowned, Uncle William is recognized by all the great European citadels of learning—Edinburgh, London, Paris, Leipzig, Upsala. He is the discoverer of no less than 1,488 species of New World plants. Before his death in ’78, the great Linnaeus himself christened three species after Uncle: a spike-leafed dogbane (Apocynum walkerania), a showy pogonia (Triphora walkera), and a downy bladderwort (Utricularia walkerania).

Where Papa is tall and trim, Uncle is five feet, five inches and as stout as a cask. Yet a zest for the labors of botany keeps him stronger than men half his age, which is sixty-one years. At home this first warm day of spring, he wears his linen shirt open at the throat, for he has been working among the plantings of his renowned garden since breakfast. His breeches are buff velvet, once part of a fine suit, now patched and threadbare. His old cocked hat shows the remnant of an egret plume. Now it merely serves to ward off the sun’s chastening rays. His boots are muddy and cracked. None of this should suggest that Uncle has fallen upon evil times, nor that he is any species of sloven. He owns, as a matter of fact, several good French suits. These are work clothes.

In coiffure, Uncle bears a striking resemblance to Dr. Franklin. He is bald—the family curse!—and wears what remains to his shoulder, sans queue. His prominent chin bears a deep cleft. As he smiles, two even rows of teeth are displayed. Uncle has never smoked tobacco (though he grows specimens of Nicotiana in his garden), and likewise avoids sugar, which he claims has a degenerative effect. He is thus better equipped for chewing at sixty-one than myself at nineteen—I having surrendered three inflamed molars already to the surgeon’s terrible tongs!

It was in Uncle’s garden that I learned of our forthcoming interview at Washington City with his friend President Jefferson, upon what business he would not say (for at that time he did not know the reason for his summons). Because I was a Hamilton man, such a prospect for me compared as a meeting with Beelzebub himself, and I said so.

“Thy Papa writes that thou art quite an ardent of the Federalist faction.”

“I read the Evening Post,” I replied coyly, alluding to the newspaper that published my idol’s writings—he owned it. “And you are a Republican, sir?”

Uncle smiled.

“I am as much an admirer of Mr. Jefferson, Sammy, as thee of Publius,” Uncle wryly bandied one of Hamilton’s noms de plume. “Two days hence thee shall meet thy devil in his own sulfurous chamber, ho ho…!”

And so we did.