The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [50]
Evidence that his heart, if not his body, was repairing itself came on 9 August. “It being Edith Carow’s 17th birthday, I sent her a bonbonièrre.” The young lady made her annual appearance at Oyster Bay a week later, and Theodore paid her his annual attentions, rowing her to Lloyds Neck, lunching out at Yellowbanks, and picking water lilies with her in Coldspring Harbor. Without reading more into the diary than is actually there, it is possible to discern the mounting excitement he felt in her proximity. On 22 August he let off steam by thundering off on a wild ride “that I am afraid … may have injured my horse.” Later the same day Edith joined him for a sailing trip, and in the evening they went to a family party together. “Afterwards,” his diary entry concludes, “Edith and I went up to the summer house.”62
With this enigmatic remark, a curtain of blank paper descends, and Edith is not mentioned again for months. Whatever happened in the summerhouse, it seems to have kindled some sort of rage in Theodore. Only two days later he was bothered, while riding, by a neighbor’s dog; drawing his revolver, he shot it dead, “rolling it over very neatly as it ran alongside the horse.”63 On a cruise up Long Island Sound with some male cousins, he blazed away with the same gun at anything he saw in the water, “from bottles or buoys to sharks and porpoises.”64
With the first chill of fall in the air, Theodore’s thoughts turned again to Harvard, and to his future. The uncertainty he had felt ever since committing himself to a scientific career was beginning to worry him, so much so he turned to an uncle for reassurance. But the old gentleman, while sympathetic, was unhelpful, and Theodore’s bewilderment increased. “I have absolutely no idea what I should do when I leave college,” he wrote in despair. “Oh Father, my Father, no words can tell how I shall miss your counsel and advice!”65
AS IF TO SEEK REFUGE from his doubts, he decided to spend the last few weeks of his vacation in the wilds of Aroostook County, in northern Maine. Arthur Cutler had hunted in the area—one of the last stands of virgin forest in the Northeast—and had suggested that Theodore might like to do the same. There was a backwoodsman there, said Cutler, named Bill Sewall; he kept open house for hunters, and was emphatically “a man to know.” Huge, bearded, and full of lust for life, Sewall loved to shout poetry as he fought his canoe through white water, or slammed his ax into shuddering pine trees. No doubt Cutler sensed that this magnificent specimen of manhood might satisfy Theodore’s cravings for a father figure. And since Sewall was humbly born, he might rub off some of the boy’s veneer of snobbism before it toughened into impenetrable bark.
Island Falls, where Sewall had his headquarters, was so remote from New York City that Theodore took two full days to get there, completing the last thirty-six miles in a buckboard. Two cousins, Emlen and West Roosevelt, and a Doctor W. Thompson accompanied him. The strain of the journey, coming on top of his frenetic summer, caused him to suffer a bad attack of asthma, and when he arrived at Sewall’s homestead, late on the evening of 7 September, he was wheezing. Sewall’s first impression of him was “a thin, pale youngster with bad eyes and a weak heart.”
Doctor Thompson took the backwoodsman aside. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.” Sewall agreed