Free The Vagabonds by Nicholas DelBanco

a newfound land took what comfort they might find in numbers, the solidarity of fellowship: not for the Pilgrims isolation except insofar as enforced. And, later, with the pioneers, those wagon trains that flourished did so at least in part because of size: the more the merrier.
My wheel has broken, brother; might I pattern a new one on yours? My jerky and biscuit have furnished a saltwater banquet for rats; might I sit at table with you, o dear companion, instead?
    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;