Free The Vagabonds by Nicholas DelBanco Page B

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