The Vagabonds (8 page)

So they traveled in some style. Not wasteful or inordinate, he told Minna when she queried him and he was taking his husbandly leave; we do not shave at breakfast time when breaking camp, nor dress for dinner routinely. We’re roughing it, old girl. Next year perhaps you’ll join us and we’ll smooth the rough-hewn edge of what behavior might offend you: the tall tales and the stories and the old men being jocular and sleeping on the ground. John Burroughs in particular enjoys a salty story and we trade them turn by turn; do you know the one, I asked him, about the farmer’s son who pushed the outhouse off the cliff? Burroughs had not heard the tale, or claimed not to remember, and so I gave him the rest of the jest, the way the farmer asks his son,
Now answer me and tell the truth, did you push that outhouse off the cliff?
The boy admits it:
Yes sir, I did, I cannot tell a lie.
So the farmer wales away with strap and stick and when finally the beating is done the tearful young fellow protests:
But Father, you instructed me always to be truthful, to behave as did George Washington and confess all error, as when he felled the cherry tree.
Then the father says,
That’s true enough, but George Washington’s dear papa wasn’t in the tree!

Again, Thomas Edison laughed. The day had been fine, the end of it tapering down now to dusk and this the thirty-first of August: still seasonably warm but not intolerably so. A small breeze kept the flies at bay, and yonder was the appetizing prospect of their evening meal, the dining tents readied already by Peter Barclay and efficient Yukio and Sam. The cookstoves were unloaded and the fires being built. Here, concluded Edison—the self-declared Magellan of their journey, the map reader and route planner—they would pass the night.

What vagabonding have they not between them undertaken; what pleasures remain still in store! They have planned to reconnoiter with their fellow tramp at Plattsburgh, where Henry Ford will join them, or so he promises. Drawing daybook out of pocket and the pen he carried constantly, Edison perused a passage entered there:
We must consider volume as an aspect of preparedness. At what point in a caravan does size itself prove counterproductive, a liability, not asset? The very dinosaurs outsized themselves, requiring more by way of sustenance than their great bulk could forage for; the bending reed outlasts the hurricane that fells a mighty oak.

For lunch he’d taken toast and milk, for breakfast much the same. A man should eat sparingly, sparingly, and all the more so if inclined to bulk, as Edison inclined. Old Burroughs required no such caution, a bundle of sticks in a waistcoat: mere gristle and sinew and bone. But whether this was lifelong habit or a function of increasing age, John Burroughs matched him, slice for meager slice, whereas Firestone mocked their abstemiousness and slathered butter on. A pup, a whelp, a rich man’s boy—but good company nevertheless.

Young William Dancey approached. The boy was whispering something; Edison cupped his right ear. “Say what?”

“Have you been to Saratoga previously, sir, have your travels brought you here?”

He shook his head.

“Let me commend it. A pleasant town. Most pleasing. My uncle keeps a cottage hereabouts.”

“And do you wish to see him?”

“The news of our arrival, sir, precedes us.”

“As everywhere,” said Edison. Did not the birds send out a notice of their caravan’s approach and then fall silent up above; did not the ground-based creatures scurry and scuttle away? The wilderness, he had observed, is a conduit for gossip unequaled by the telegraph . . .

Young Dancey proffered inaudible answer.

“So everywhere,” continued Edison, “we have these journalists. Photographers. And why not your uncle, my boy?”

The driver smiled. “He does hope to make your acquaintance.”

“‘Together with his sisters and his cousins and his aunts,’” said Edison. He was feeling jocular. He liked the young man’s countenance. “We’ll give the sisters and cousins to Firestone, the aunts to Burroughs, eh?”

“I’ll set additional place at your table then. Thank you kindly, sir.”

They had sported in this fashion last year equally and would again, again. The proposition that they should explore the Adirondacks had been Ford’s; he had been primum mobile, although not of the party tonight—rather the way, mused Edison, that those who hold a patent for invention need not supervise an installation or fine-tune each engine itself. When he and Henry traveled first in California, from San Francisco down to San Diego—by private railroad car and then automobile, with Luther Burbank and the potentates, with name-days in their honor and prearranged festivity and the wearisome attentiveness of those who think proximity to power is itself a form of achievement—when they had had enough of speechifying, sanctimony and affairs of state, the friends together had declared a preference for roughing it, for the simplicity of bygone days and a return to nature’s cradle. No railroad cars hereafter, no fawning hoteliers!

He shrugged himself out of his coat. Hard to remember now and bootless to debate which of them first proposed a caravan, who added the idea of wandering for its own sake and not with an end view or target in mind—but only the pleasures of camping together, of friendship unalloyed by staff or the importunities of business. And these pleasures proved (no better word for it!) keen. Keen the enjoyment that Edison took in his naps in his clothing and hammock; keen the enjoyment of cutting down trees and pitting himself against stopwatch and comrade; keen their shared pleasure in the close examination of waterfall and sluiceway and mill-site, and keen the enjoyment of flower and rock . . .

He had to admit it: old Burroughs knew much. Give the man a net and hammer and he returned from his forays replete. Give the man a double-bladed axe and, hey presto, down the tree! Approach a hollow log with bees and John the naturalist, the expert on behavior, would discourse at such fervent length that Edison found himself grateful to be, for all practical purposes, deaf. A nod, a knowing wink sufficed by way of answer, since any half-formed query would occasion such a lecture that the others of the party would despair of its completion and, when the bee-lover turned his back to point to some particularly salient feature of the apiary—a honeycomb, a drove of drones—those who had to hear him out would shrug and roll their eyes.

The occasion of their friendship was itself a form of fun. Old man Burroughs, with his prophet’s beard, his memories of Whitman and his tracts against the modern age, his vigorous espousal of the virtues of simplicity, his jeremiads as to engines and the American landscape despoiled, his eloquent inveighing at the very
idea
of internal combustion—this voice in the wilderness trumpeting was one Ford determined to silence or at least to sway. Clever Henry sent Burroughs a car. My Model T, he said, is at your service, sir; please know your enemy’s nature before you are certain it cannot prove friend. I respect your writings far too much to try to contravene them but would respect your opinion even more if experience-based; drive Tin Lizzie till you warrant if she be real or fool’s gold.

And Burroughs was enthralled. No city swell or society boy could have been more elated than John-of-the-hills, no young spark more afire with the pleasures of the wheel. Later, they would joke of it: Saul on the road to Tarsus, King Constantine before the cross—no convert more committed to this latter-day true Grail. So it was wholly natural they should motor up from Orange and collect old Burroughs at his farm and then motor on.
“How are you, John?” “How are you, Tom?”
and the briefest of pauses for loading and then hail and away . . .

Young Harvey Firestone by contrast embraced his creature comforts. Last night in Albany, for instance, he was unable to withstand the offer of a hotel room and shower, and this morning appeared fresh-shaved and glistening, his moustache trim, the sheen of his boots newly bright. When Edison reminded him that the hallmarks of the vagabond were stubble and dullness, he laughed. And then, as so often surprising them with his memory’s acuity, he offered up a tercet from Burroughs himself:

To the woods and fields or to the hills

There to breathe their beauty like the very air

To be not a spectator of, but a participator in it all!

“Not bad,” said Burroughs placidly. “I meant it then, I mean it now.”

“Accordingly,” said Firestone, “I shaved.”

“And why?”

“To be, as you put it, ‘a participator in it all!’ and not a mere spectator.”

“You refer to your beauty, I take it?”

“With a face like mine,” said Firestone—disarming them, as was his wont, with modesty—“a moustache to cover it helps.”

So Edison, clean-shaven, and Burroughs aping Father Time and Firestone with his pruned facial hair made a sampler for their supper guests: an empty plate, a half-filled one, a full. It had been several decades since John Burroughs viewed his own ungirdled chin; the eldest of their party would celebrate eighty next year. He was ten years Tom Edison’s senior, and more than thirty Firestone’s, and they accorded him due deference though in truth he was their equal if not better in the woods. When the guests arrived—William Dancey’s uncle, and his wife and daughter—they saluted Burroughs first. Mr. Dancey and his wife, Elise, were jovial, both, and furnished with affable chatter, and they commended the three vagabonds on their cuisine and equipage and inquired after Henry Ford—“We’re to meet at Plattsburgh,” Burroughs said—and spoke in detail of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne and the way the colonials planned their campaign (Mr. Dancey had been in the army, and he drew a map in the campground dust of how and where the British had been snookered after Schuylerville) and of the healthful waters that natives call the Springs.

It was hard not to notice the girl. Whereas the father had grown portly and his consort overflowed her stays, the Dancey daughter was lissome: bright, light. Her gaze, though modest, was direct, her eyes a clear gray-green. The ringlets of her hair were brown and her cheeks were petal-strewn, a hint of rose on porcelain; the lips suggested ardor though as yet they had not practiced it; she was, she owned, sixteen. Old Edison felt stirred by sweet remembrance of his vanished youth, old Burroughs much the same. Young Firestone pulled up his chair.

They were sitting under tamaracks. The tamarack tree, so Edison knew—for Burroughs was extensive, not to say exhaustive in instruction, and for twenty minutes he discoursed upon the salient characteristics of deciduous and nondeciduous trees—is the sole member of the family of pine that sheds its leaves in autumn; the English call it larch. This gives a special poignancy, said Burroughs, to its foliage; all else endures the wintry blast but tamarack needles will yellow and soften and fall. There be tamarack swamps to the north. Just so—the Sage of Slabsides knelt and sifted the thick humus at their feet—will we in turn be carpeting for what must follow after; our children’s children, Tom, will prosper where we rot. That girl there, for example—and Burroughs bent his wild white head, then ceased to speak, or ceased to say what Edison could hear.
That girl there. . . .

As a signal of his good intentions and soon-to-follow arrival, Ford had sent his man ahead: the Japanese cook Yukio, with hatchet and honed knives. It was delightful and informative to watch the fellow work. Since carrot and beef shank and onion cannot be rendered uniform—retaining in their very nature that irregularity which some say is the spice of life—he cut and chopped and trimmed. Variety of size and shape, although intrinsic to the provender, did not deter the cook; the rate at which he diced those irregular foodstuffs before him proved more rapid and less wasteful than would have been a machine. Last trip Henry had proposed a wager; he’d said, take these fifty-weight potatoes and divide them equally and give my half to Yukio and yours to this shaped cutting box. Then let’s see which peels and slices them with greater yield.

Why not five hundred, Edison had countered, or, come to that, five thousand? Because, said Ford—the sponsor of interchangeable parts and a massed assembly line—we are not feeding multitudes. Our party this night numbers thirty, or at the most thirty-five. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, Edison had teased him, but Henry shook his head. No, no, it’s mere indulgence; I think of Yukio as expert in the culinary arts and not as a factory worker; there is only one of him here.

And yet he did seem multiple, so rapid with cleaver and chop-block that his hands were but a blur. His shaved head gleamed, his hairless forearms too where he rolled back his sleeves. There were assistants to help him (fetching water from the nearby spring, straining it through cheesecloth and thereafter boiling it, and a sous-chef for the sauces and another for the pastry) but the fellow gave no vocal instruction, or no orders that proved audible—a nod of the head here, a shake of it there—assembling the repast alone. He mounded fruit and legumes and the dressed birds on the serving trays with lightninglike celerity, seeming never once to need to buttress what in other hands might, wobbling, topple or from other platters fall. Such expertise, thought Edison, is worthy of you, Ford . . .

The vagabonds gathered to table and settled themselves to the meal. Having said a heartfelt grace, the men raised their tumblers and drank. These excursions were intended to remind those who conjoined in them of simple pleasures, early times, and that one need not be archaic to reside in Arcady. John Burroughs in particular said his old bones required motion or they’d seize up and grow immobile as though calcified by dew; the exercise I take, he said, is more necessity than choice. But it has been my habit now for decades and I could no sooner cease such bodily exertion than cease breathing altogether; indeed, the two are one.

“We have a home nearby,” the elder Dancey announced to his hosts. “A farmhouse you’d be welcome to, should you prefer its rustic comfort to the fields.”

“How so?” inquired Firestone.

“We keep it furnished now for guests. It is my mother-in-law’s.”

“And how near do you mean by ‘nearby’?”