The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [45]
Because as an adult T.R. preached the strenuous life, recording his rugged outdoor adventures and battlefield prowess with such dramatic flair, it’s often forgotten that his aptitude for professions other than naturalist or author was minimal. His abysmal health ruled out an appointment to West Point or Annapolis. He had no predilection for the world of commerce. Managing the family’s fortune didn’t interest him—in fact, he brushed off the chance to become a partner in Roosevelt and Sons. He felt antipathy toward bankers, accountants, and financiers. And every time Theodore gazed at a law book, his eyes glazed over in boredom. Even though his uncle Robert B. Roosevelt tried to nudge him toward the law, even a squad of top-notch defense or prosecuting attorneys could never have convinced him that habeas corpus was a more interesting concept than the migratory habits of Ectopistes migratorius—the passenger pigeon.
Therefore, Theodore’s career path seemed as plain as day: to become a Harvard-trained biologist or naturalist.12 Someday his specimens could become part of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology Collection, Roosevelt hoped, displayed beside the natural history artifacts donated by George Washington, Meriwether Lewis, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, and John James Audubon.13 For most of his life, Theodore had been homeschooled. He was never enrolled in public school, and he attended a private school in Manhattan for only a brief time. Theodore Sr. hired a highly regarded tutor, Arthur Cutler, to help Theodore brush up for Harvard’s notoriously difficult entrance exam. Years later Cutler was asked to recall his former student’s inherent strengths and weaknesses. “[Theodore] never seemed to know what idleness was,” he said. “Every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic, or some abstruse book on Natural History in his hand.”14
In 1874, continuing the family tradition of fleeing Manhattan every summer, Theodore Sr. decided to rent a house in Oyster Bay. A jutting curve of land on the North Shore of Long Island, less than an hour by train from midtown Manhattan, Oyster Bay had been founded in 1653. By the time of the American Revolution, it was a bustling seaport. Although it later boasted that “George Washington slept here,”15 Oyster Bay had actually been a hotbed of loyalist sentiment once the port was occupied by British troops after the Battle of Long Island. By the time the Roosevelts started summering in Oyster Bay, wealthy New Yorkers, attracted by the breezes coming off Long Island Sound, had built blocks of Victorian and colonial homes. Just after the Civil War, Oyster Bay had grown into a popular summertime getaway location for New Yorkers desperate to escape the clamor and congestion of urban life. Appropriately, the town seal of Oyster Bay eventually became a seagull in flight.16
Theodore’s mother, Mittie, named the waterfront estate her husband leased “Tranquility.” With its columns, attractive veranda, and huge parlor, it was like something out of the antebellum South. The name, however, was a misnomer, for the house constantly sang with activity. As the old adage goes, life begins at the water’s edge. And Oyster Bay was no exception. On the North Shore the quaint meadows, low hills, and dense woodlands were a bird lover’s paradise. Just rocking on Tranquility’s veranda allowed Theodore to see surf scoters, old squaws, herring gulls, red-throated loons, catbirds, and chickadees. The soliloquy of the open bay was conveyed by these preening birds, and all young Theodore had to do when the four o’clock shadows arrived