Free The Vagabonds by Nicholas DelBanco Page A

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