The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [60]
For thirty-six precious hours, in late August, Theodore was able to worship his beloved in body as well as spirit. En route to yet another vacation in Maine, he stopped off in Boston and spent a couple of nights at Chestnut Hill. Alice accompanied him to a beach party, walked with him through the woods, showed off her graceful prowess on the tennis court, and was his partner at a barn dance. She was “so bewitchingly pretty” he could continue north “only by heroic self-denial.”53 Had Island Falls not been beyond the reach of any telegram, Theodore would have undoubtedly canceled his booking with Bill Sewall, and remained at Chestnut Hill to eat lotus fruit with the Lees.54
HARSHER PLEASURES AWAITED HIM in Aroostook County, where the first chill of fall was already in the air. Since his first trip to Island Falls in 1878, Theodore had been longing to climb Mount Katahdin, whose silhouette massively dominated the western windows of Sewall’s cabin.55 Forty miles away and 5,268 feet high, Katahdin was the highest mountain in Maine, and was surrounded by some of the most intractable forest in the Northeast. Now the young underclassman felt sufficiently tough and “forest-wise” to answer the challenge on the horizon. Arthur Cutler and his cousin Emlen Roosevelt, who were also vacationing at Island Falls, agreed to join him. After only two days of preparation they helped Sewall and Dow to load up a wagon, and set off southwest into a dank, dripping wilderness.56
If nothing else, the events of the next eight days made Cutler withdraw his old doubts about Theodore’s stamina. Although conditions were wet and slippery, the young man effortlessly toted a forty-five-pound pack up the ever-steepening mountain. Losing a shoe in a stream, he padded on in moccasins, which protected his feet “about as effectually as kid gloves.” Yet despite the pain of tramping over miles of rain-slicked stones, he triumphantly reached the top with Sewall and Dow. Cutler and Emlen remained far below, in a state of collapse.57 That night, as the rain beat their tents and bedding into a sodden mess, Theodore noted in his diary: “I can endure fatigue and hardship pretty nearly as well as these lumbermen.”58 His fellow New Yorkers could not. As soon as the party got back to Island Falls on 2 September they left exhausted for home.
Having thus, as it were, flexed his muscles, Theodore set off with Bill Sewall on a second expedition, to the Munsungen Lakes, compared to which “our trip to Katahdin was absolute luxury.” It included a fifty-mile, six-day voyage up the Aroostook River in a pirogue, or heavy dugout canoe. Fully half the time they had to drag or push the boat through torrential rapids, pausing occasionally to hack their way through beaver dams and log drifts. They spent ten hours a day up to their hips in icy water, stumbling constantly on sharp, slimy stones. “But, oh how we slept at night! And how we enjoyed the salt pork, hardtack and tea which constituted our food!”59
By way of relaxing after this bruising expedition, Theodore persuaded Sewall and Dow to take a third jaunt, during which they drove or marched over a hundred miles in three days. Rain fell unceasingly, but Theodore continued to delight in his “superb health” and ability to walk, wrestle, and shoot on near-equal terms with backwoodsmen. When Sewall and Dow finally put him on the Boston train on 24 September, he declared he felt “strong as a bull.”60 The two big men, watching his skinny arm wave them goodbye, may have had their doubts about that—Sewall for years afterward continued to think of him as “frail”—but they could not fail to be awed by his vitality.61 He had taken them on in their own environment, and proved himself as good as they.
ON THE MORNING AFTER his return to Cambridge, Theodore emerged from breakfast at the Porc and found his new dog-cart outside the door, lamps and lacquerwork gleaming. Lightfoot waited patiently between its curving poles, long since resigned